Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Data-Driven Strategies for Accelerated Materials Design

Journal Article · · Accounts of Chemical Research
The ongoing revolution of the natural sciences by the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence sparked significant interest in the material science community in recent years. The intrinsically high dimensionality of the space of realizable materials makes traditional approaches ineffective for large-scale explorations. Modern data science and machine learning tools developed for increasingly complicated problems are an attractive alternative. An imminent climate catastrophe calls for a clean energy transformation by overhauling current technologies within only several years of possible action available. Tackling this crisis requires the development of new materials at an unprecedented pace and scale. For example, organic photovoltaics have the potential to replace existing silicon-based materials to a large extent and open up new fields of application. In recent years, organic light-emitting diodes have emerged as state-of-the-art technology for digital screens and portable devices and are enabling new applications with flexible displays. Reticular frameworks allow the atom-precise synthesis of nanomaterials and promise to revolutionize the field by the potential to realize multifunctional nanoparticles with applications from gas storage, gas separation, and electrochemical energy storage to nanomedicine. In the recent decade, significant advances in all these fields have been facilitated by the comprehensive application of simulation and machine learning for property prediction, property optimization, and chemical space exploration enabled by considerable advances in computing power and algorithmic efficiency. In this Account, we review the most recent contributions of our group in this thriving field of machine learning for material science. We start with a summary of the most important material classes our group has been involved in, focusing on small molecules as organic electronic materials and crystalline materials. Specifically, we highlight the data-driven approaches we employed to speed up discovery and derive material design strategies. Subsequently, our focus lies on the data-driven methodologies our group has developed and employed, elaborating on high-throughput virtual screening, inverse molecular design, Bayesian optimization, and supervised learning. We discuss the general ideas, their working principles, and their use cases with examples of successful implementations in data-driven material discovery and design efforts. Furthermore, we elaborate on potential pitfalls and remaining challenges of these methods. Finally, we provide a brief outlook for the field as we foresee increasing adaptation and implementation of large scale data-driven approaches in material discovery and design campaigns.
Research Organization:
Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
Austrian Science Fund (FWF); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); US Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0008688
OSTI ID:
1784732
Journal Information:
Accounts of Chemical Research, Journal Name: Accounts of Chemical Research Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 54; ISSN 0001-4842
Publisher:
American Chemical SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (58)

Learning from the Harvard Clean Energy Project: The Use of Neural Networks to Accelerate Materials Discovery journal September 2015
Film Fabrication Techniques: Beyond Ternary OPV: High‐Throughput Experimentation and Self‐Driving Laboratories Optimize Multicomponent Systems (Adv. Mater. 14/2020) journal April 2020
Alkaline Benzoquinone Aqueous Flow Battery for Large-Scale Storage of Electrical Energy journal December 2017
Discovery of Calcium-Metal Alloy Anodes for Reversible Ca-Ion Batteries journal January 2019
Design and natural science research on information technology journal December 1995
Digital Reticular Chemistry journal September 2020
Materials Acceleration Platforms: On the way to autonomous experimentation journal October 2020
Design Principles and Top Non-Fullerene Acceptor Candidates for Organic Photovoltaics journal December 2017
Alkaline Quinone Flow Battery with Long Lifetime at pH 12 journal September 2018
18% Efficiency organic solar cells journal February 2020
Next-Generation Experimentation with Self-Driving Laboratories journal June 2019
Identification Schemes for Metal–Organic Frameworks To Enable Rapid Search and Cheminformatics Analysis journal September 2019
Organic Optoelectronic Materials: Mechanisms and Applications journal October 2016
Light Harvesting for Organic Photovoltaics journal March 2016
Achievements, Challenges, and Prospects of Calcium Batteries journal October 2019
Singlet–Triplet Inversion in Heptazine and in Polymeric Carbon Nitrides journal August 2019
Inverted Singlet–Triplet Gaps and Their Relevance to Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence journal August 2019
The Matter Simulation (R)evolution journal February 2018
Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules journal January 2018
Phoenics: A Bayesian Optimizer for Chemistry journal August 2018
Status and Prospects of Organic Redox Flow Batteries toward Sustainable Energy Storage journal August 2019
SMILES, a chemical language and information system. 1. Introduction to methodology and encoding rules journal February 1988
Computation-Ready, Experimental Metal–Organic Frameworks: A Tool To Enable High-Throughput Screening of Nanoporous Crystals journal October 2014
Extending the Lifetime of Organic Flow Batteries via Redox State Management journal April 2019
The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Large-Scale Computational Screening and Design of Organic Photovoltaics on the World Community Grid journal August 2011
Identification of cathode materials for lithium batteries guided by first-principles calculations journal April 1998
From computational discovery to experimental characterization of a high hole mobility organic crystal journal August 2011
A redox-flow battery with an alloxazine-based organic electrolyte journal July 2016
Towards a calcium-based rechargeable battery journal October 2015
Design of efficient molecular organic light-emitting diodes by a high-throughput virtual screening and experimental approach journal August 2016
Reversible calcium alloying enables a practical room-temperature rechargeable calcium-ion battery with a high discharge voltage journal April 2018
Machine learning for molecular and materials science journal July 2018
A mobile robotic chemist journal July 2020
Inverse design of nanoporous crystalline reticular materials with deep generative models journal January 2021
Lead candidates for high-performance organic photovoltaics from high-throughput quantum chemistry – the Harvard Clean Energy Project journal January 2014
Computational design of molecules for an all-quinone redox flow battery journal January 2015
Chimera: enabling hierarchy based multi-objective optimization for self-driving laboratories journal January 2018
How accurate are approximate quantum chemical methods at modelling solute–solvent interactions in solvated clusters? journal January 2020
Recent advances in organic light-emitting diodes: toward smart lighting and displays journal January 2020
Mapping the frontiers of quinone stability in aqueous media: implications for organic aqueous redox flow batteries journal January 2019
Machine learning dihydrogen activation in the chemical space surrounding Vaska's complex journal January 2020
Accelerated computational discovery of high-performance materials for organic photovoltaics by means of cheminformatics journal January 2011
Selection bias in gene extraction on the basis of microarray gene-expression data journal April 2002
Discovery of diverse thyroid hormone receptor antagonists by high-throughput docking journal May 2003
Self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES): A 100% robust molecular string representation journal November 2020
Critical Review of Published Microarray Studies for Cancer Outcome and Guidelines on Statistical Analysis and Reporting journal January 2007
New developments in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD): accessibility in support of materials research and design journal May 2002
Taking the Human Out of the Loop: A Review of Bayesian Optimization journal January 2016
Self-driving laboratory for accelerated discovery of thin-film materials journal May 2020
Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery: To the historian discovery is seldom a unit event attributable to some particular man, time, and place journal June 1962
Inverse molecular design using machine learning: Generative models for matter engineering journal July 2018
Organic synthesis in a modular robotic system driven by a chemical programming language journal November 2018
A robotic platform for flow synthesis of organic compounds informed by AI planning journal August 2019
ChemOS: Orchestrating autonomous experimentation journal June 2018
What Is High-Throughput Virtual Screening? A Perspective from Organic Materials Discovery journal July 2015
A New Michael-Reaction-Resistant Benzoquinone for Aqueous Organic Redox Flow Batteries journal January 2017
ChemOS: An orchestration software to democratize autonomous discovery journal April 2020
Scientific Discovery: That-Whats and What-Thats journal January 2015

Similar Records

Realizing the data-driven, computational discovery of metal-organic framework catalysts
Journal Article · Sun Nov 21 19:00:00 EST 2021 · Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering · OSTI ID:1870849

Dynamic Workflows for Routine Materials Discovery in Surface Science
Journal Article · Sun Nov 18 19:00:00 EST 2018 · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · OSTI ID:1543623

Open Research Challenges with Big Data - A Data-Scientist s Perspective
Conference · Wed Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2014 · OSTI ID:1224759