"Enhancing the performance limits of nano-structured materials through atomistic modeling, experimental validation and design optimization"

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It is often remarked that the road to success is paved with failure. This is particularly true for materials technology; understanding how materials fail paves the way to make them better. Despite significant breakthroughs in recent decades through nanotechnology, advanced materials typically fail at one-tenth or less of their intrinsic limits, and we do not understand why this is. This failure of advanced structural materials is a principal bottleneck for developing future technologies in a wide range of industrial sectors such as energy, healthcare and aerospace. By itself failure modeling is an age old problem - the novelty comes from the accuracy of details you put in the mathematical model that describes failure. In the past, modeling material failure has been ad-hoc and empirical. The material scientist's dream is to put in basic details of the material into a model and then predict its failure precisely without resorting to ad-hoc parameters. This dream is starting to become achievable through a judicious coordination of computational materials science and experimental validation. This project aims to take empiricism out of failure modeling and make clear-cut progress towards computational materials design.