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

人们常说，通往成功的道路是由失败铺就的。材料技术尤其如此；了解材料如何失效，为使其变得更好铺平了道路。尽管近几十年来通过纳米技术取得了重大突破，但先进材料通常只有其固有极限的十分之一或更少，我们不明白为什么会这样。先进结构材料的这种失败是在能源、医疗保健和航空航天等广泛工业部门开发未来技术的主要瓶颈。故障建模本身就是一个古老的问题--其新颖性来自于您在描述故障的数学模型中输入的细节的准确性。在过去，对材料失效的建模一直是临时的和经验性的。这位材料科学家的梦想是把材料的基本细节放入一个模型中，然后准确地预测它的失效，而不需要求助于特殊的参数。通过计算材料科学和实验验证的明智协调，这一梦想开始变得可能实现。该项目旨在摆脱失效模型的经验主义，并在计算材料设计方面取得明确的进展。

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.