Purdue Opens New Center for Materials Development 

In response to the national Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) announced by President Obama in 2011, Purdue University has opened a new research center dedicated to modeling for materials engineering.

Called the Purdue Center for Predictive Material and Devices (c-PRIMED), led by Gerhard Klimeck and Alejandro Strachan, will work alongside Conte, the nation’s fastest university-owned supercomputer, and Purdue’s Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems (PRISM).

It follows that this isn’t Purdue’s first foray into the realm of materials engineering. In fact, Purdue’s nanoHUG.org, developed by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology was outlined in the White House’s National Scencie and Technology Council report in June 2011 that laid the foundation for the MGI.

“c-PRIMED represents a continuation and a deepening of ongoing Purdue research effortsr through nanoHUG.org,” said Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computing engineering at Purdue. “Our efforts will focus on ways to accelerate the time it takes to introduce advanced materials to the marketplace for everything from airplane wings, solar cells and electronic devices to packaging that keeps food fresher. That’s the dream behind c-PRIMED—and it’s more attainable now.”

Klimeck also works as the director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology along with nanoHUG.org, with a focus on creating atomic-scale models of future processor components for computing and and their quantum properties.

Strachan, a professor of materials engineering and deputy director at PRISM, is working to develop and validate computational methods to predict material behavior.

With ten years of experience backing him, Strachan has focused using predictive science to model and simulate materials to test thermal and mechanical properties, along with their stiffness, strength, flexibility and weight, which is an essential tool when investigating undeveloped and experimental materials.

“Knowing the uncertainties allows you to predict not just the mean behavior of a material, but its across-the-board performance with enough confidence to make decisions about which designs to concentrate on,” Strachan explains. “You want to be able to make decisions based on these predictions, and that means you have to be able to guarantee the prediction.”

With c-PRIMED, Purdue hopes the university will now have the presence to compete for significant federal and industrial investments for MGI, a part of the government’s new Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.