Western Michigan University receives grant from U.S. Department of Energy
The grant will allow university researchers to make advancements in energy development through atomic level purity.
Western Michigan University researchers have received a grant from the US Department of Energy in the amount of nearly $800,000. The grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Makin, who serves as an assistant professor of computer science, and a team of investigators for the project called “Investigation and Prediction of Structural Ordering in Monocrystalline Nitrides Through Classical and Generative Machine Learning and Tunable Energetics.”
According to an article on Western Michigan University’s website, Dr. Makin explains the impact this project will have. He is quoted as saying, “Achieving atomically precise materials at manufacturing scale would enable unprecedented functionality across a range of applications and would have high technological, economic, environmental and societal impact.”
Along with Dr. Makin, Mike Konkel, who is a master faculty specialist at Western Michigan University, and Dr. Brelon May, an applied physicist at the Idaho National Laboratory, will complete a series of research items that will have real-world effects, on batteries, fuel cells, and more. The team will strive to develop a new plasma technology with the aid of machine learning to render quality materials. They will examine the crystalline form of niobium nitride and tantalum nitride.
One of the three major goals of the project is to help fabricate corona discharge for plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (PAMBE). This portion of the project will be overseen by Konkel.
Another of the goals, which is to be overseen by Dr. May, is to explore PAMBE recipes and test the data using molecular-beam-epitaxy-related machine learning.
The final goal of the project is to develop machine learning synthesis models which are chamber-agnostic, meaning their results can be validated at both the Idaho National Lab and at Western Michigan University.
For this project, Western Michigan University received a majority of the grant funding, $619,980, and the Idaho National Lab received the rest, $180,000, for its efforts on the project.
For more information about Western Michigan University, visit the school’s website.