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Can a city’s seawall stand up to a blockbuster storm? Will a region’s power grid hold against record-breaking heat? And can a town’s fire-fighting resources contain a major wildfire? To answer these questions, communities will first need to know how such extreme events could unfold. How far is a wildfire likely to spread? How much of […]
Generating scenarios for extreme events, without extreme data Read More »
Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals produced in the world, ranking second only to sulfuric acid in the total volume produced each year. It is used mostly to make fertilizer, which is essential to feeding the world’s population. Yet its production accounts for up to 2 percent of the world’s energy consumption and
Artificial intelligence models are jacks of many trades, including writing, generating images, and creating 3D models. But they aren’t as helpful when it comes to testing robots or designs for vehicles in diverse environments, since they don’t understand physics as well as they do pixels or text.To build an AI system that can reliably simulate
With a feel for physics, AI models simulate a wider range of real-world scenarios Read More »
Lithium-ion batteries are the leading choice in today’s electric vehicle and battery energy storage system industries, but they contain a number of critical minerals — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite — that are considered essential for economic and national security reasons, and therefore vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. As renewable energy, electrified infrastructure, and
For nuclear to be considered as a viable clean energy source, it has to be competitively priced and economical to produce. Lauren Fortier, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is helping the cause by developing remote operation protocols for autonomous control of nuclear plants. After an undergraduate degree in materials
Engineers often use vision-language models to produce new designs, such as for airplane or automobile components. To simulate how those components will perform in realistic situations, they’ll use tried-and-true computer-aided design (CAD) software to generate 3D models of those designs, which they can put through virtual crash or durability tests. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have
A better way to turn 2D designs into 3D models for rapid prototyping Read More »
Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful
A better way to model the behavior of metal alloys Read More »
In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice. Thurstone was a pioneer of “psychometrics” — a
Today, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States, more than in any other country in the world, and these units collectively provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. That is a major accomplishment, according to Dean Price, but he believes that our country needs much more out of nuclear energy, especially
In biology, defects are generally bad. But in materials science, defects can be intentionally tuned to give materials useful new properties. Today, atomic-scale defects are carefully introduced during the manufacturing process of products like steel, semiconductors, and solar cells to help improve strength, control electrical conductivity, optimize performance, and more.But even as defects have become
MIT researchers use AI to uncover atomic defects in materials Read More »
