Researchers to Develop Software to Improve Discovery of Low-Cost, Sustainable Energy Materials

AUSTIN, Texas — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have received a $6.2 million grant over a five-year period to develop computer software to design and discover materials for low-cost energy applications. Potential uses include economical battery materials to capture solar energy and materials that convert water to hydrogen using sunlight. "The software we develop will help eliminate the expensive trial and error of laboratory experiments trying to predict and understand the properties of materials," said James Chelikowsky , the project's principal investigator and director of the Center for Computational Materials within the university's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES). "Our new code will incorporate, and thus shortcut for other researchers, the enormously complex equations that predict properties of materials solely from knowledge of their chemical composition, which is a key element for energy materials," he said. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded the five-year grant to Chelikowsky, the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief, Jr. Chair of Computational Materials and professor in the departments of Physics, Chemical Engineering, and Chemistry and Biochemistry. Chelikowsky will lead a multi-institutional team.