Efficient Materials Informatics between Rockets and Electrons

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, AI-guided materials informatics infrastructure across multiple abstraction levels, enabling advanced design of high-performance alloys and materials for aerospace and energy applications.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-level, generalizable materials informatics framework integrating AI with thermodynamic and atomistic models, supported by novel algorithms and large datasets.

Findings

Development of a graph-based mathematical space representation.

Creation of a new efficient featurization framework for ML.

Design of multi-alloy FGMs for high-temperature applications.

Abstract

The true power of computational research typically can lay in either what it accomplishes or what it enables others to accomplish. In this work, both avenues are simultaneously embraced across several distinct efforts existing at three general scales of abstractions of what a material is - atomistic, physical, and design. At each, an efficient materials informatics infrastructure is being built from the ground up based on (1) the fundamental understanding of the underlying prior knowledge, including the data, (2) deployment routes that take advantage of it, and (3) pathways to extend it in an autonomous or semi-autonomous fashion, while heavily relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to guide well-established DFT-based ab initio and CALPHAD-based thermodynamic methods. The resulting multi-level discovery infrastructure is highly generalizable as it focuses on encoding problems to solve them easily rather than looking for an existing solution. To showcase it, this dissertation discusses the design of multi-alloy functionally graded materials (FGMs) incorporating ultra-high temperature refractory high entropy alloys (RHEAs) towards gas turbine and jet engine efficiency increase reducing CO2 emissions, as well as hypersonic vehicles. It leverages a new graph representation of underlying mathematical space using a newly developed algorithm based on combinatorics, not subject to many problems troubling the community. Underneath, property models and phase relations are learned from optimized samplings of the largest and highest quality dataset of HEA in the world, called ULTERA. At the atomistic level, a data ecosystem optimized for machine learning (ML) from over 4.5 million relaxed structures, called MPDD, is used to inform experimental observations and improve thermodynamic models by providing stability data enabled by a new efficient featurization framework.