Context

Materials are an enabler for innovation, particularly in the industrial sector, and play a central role in addressing global competition in the energy sector and beyond. In fact, materials represent the “basic” element of energy technologies, including batteries, solar cells, semiconductors, catalysts and membranes for the capture and storage of CO2, etc. The identification of new materials requires a complex process, articulated and expensive, as well as changing the composition of a material requires a long procedure of research and development that includes simulation, synthesis, experimental and numerical characterization with the execution of numerous tests. Ultimately, in order to identify and select a suitable material for a given application, it is necessary to implement a process that is often very expensive and can take extremely long time, ranging from several years to a few decades. In order to accelerate this process, Mission Innovation – through IC#6 “Clean Energy Materials” – envisages the creation of a MAP (Materials Acceleration Platform) that can automatically achieve, by combining BigData and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, an acceleration in the process of analysis of computational and experimental data in order to identify the most suitable materials for a given application.