| Abstract Scope |
The technologies needed to enable affordable and reliable energy increasingly incorporate high-performance materials with properties engineered at the molecular scale. The complex structures and compositions of such materials enable them to outperform their predecessors, but they can also be challenging to manufacture at scale: how can molecularly precise materials be manufactured reliably in kilogram quantities, far exceeding the scales at which they were discovered? This stage of development is critical for commercialization but risky and costly, since new, scalable processes frequently need to be developed to replace the non-scalable syntheses used during materials discovery. Scale-up can be accelerated by the application of scientific techniques, including operando materials characterization, and artificial intelligence.
The Materials Engineering Research Facility (MERF) at Argonne National Laboratory is a state-of-the-art, 50,000 sf R&D facility focused on processes for accelerated materials synthesis, scale-up of new chemistries, and the development and validation of emerging materials manufacturing technologies. |