University Place  Ian Robertson The Grand Challenges for Engineering  March 19, 2014 UP998   cc >> Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at UW-Madison's Biotechnology Center.  I also work for UW Extension, Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those folks and other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Ian Robertson. He is the new Dean of the College of Engineering here at UW Madison. He got his Bachelor's Degree in Applied Physics in 1978 at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. In 1982, he got his DPhil, which I will say as a PhD I believe in Metallurgy from Oxford. 

In the same year, he came over to the United States, and joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. He was there for nearly 20 years, yup nearly 20 years. In 2011, he went to the National Science Foundation where he served as Director of the Division of Materials Research. Just last year, he arrived on campus as the new dean for the College of Engineering. When my Grandpa Zinnen worked for the Burlington Railroad, and when I was finishing up in high school, I had all these friends that when you said what are you going to do, where you're going to go, they said, "Well, I'm going to go to school and study Engineering." I thought, "There's not the many trains." [laughter] I wished I had known more about what engineering is. A few years ago, I went to France and visited a molecular biology building. Across the front was Genietic. Genie is spelled like Genie, G-E-N-I-E. That's there phrase for genetic engineering. It's a really great tradition of Engineering. 

In every other language of Western Europe save English, it's spelled ingen. Very clearly that engineering isn't about engines. It's about ingenuity. I think that's one of the great things. We can't all be geniuses, but we can all be ingenious. Some of us are lucky and we get to be engineers. I wish I had been, but I wasn't. Please join me in welcoming Dean Ian Robertson of UW-Madison. [applause]  >> Again, good evening. It's a great pleasure for me to be here this evening, and to present this evening's lecture. 

I should say I'm here somewhat by chance. I was actually on my way from Engineering Hall up to the CALS building, and that was in the winter time. It was pretty cold and pretty snowy, and so I had a hat on. My hat had the National Science Foundation logo. I was basically stopped in the street for someone saying, Where did you get that hat from because you don't see many people with an NSF logo on their hat. I said, "I just finished being at the National Science Foundation." He said, "Well, could you come give a talk this evening?" That's how I actually ended up coming here. When you think then what is it that I could actually come and tell you about, I thought one of the things that might be of some interest to you is just to learn a little about the National Science Foundation, how we actually make some decisions, how we launch new initiatives. Some are internal to the National Science Foundation. Some actually end up being national initiatives. What I'm going to tell you about tonight is a national initiative. 

It's called the Materials Genome Initiative. I'll explain what that means as we go through. Before I do that, I should tell you just a little about my background and how I ended up with the National Science Foundation. I'd served on the advisory board for the director of Mathematical and Physical Science at the National Science Foundation for three years. Shortly after leaving that assignment, they actually invited me to come and serve as the director for the Division of Materials Research. It's known within the foundation as DMR, so if I laps into the acronym part, it does mean Division of Materials Research. It's one of five divisions within the Mathematical and Physical Science directress. The others divisions in that director is Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. The director has an annual budget of about $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion. The National Science Foundation budget I think the last I saw which was just this week in the new budget requests, there's a request for about $7.3 billion. 

The director always is one of the largest there. My division Material Research had a budget of about $300 million. That's basically I was in-charge of for the two years I was there. Well, my friends and colleagues would always say, "Well, the budget stayed quite flat while you were there. What were you doing?" [laughter] The answer really was we do launch new initiatives. We do new things at the NSF almost every year. If your budget staying relatively flat, the only way that you could actually start new initiatives is if you hold some of the money back from all of the divisions when you're disposing it each year. That's what NSF would-- My job was to make sure that I was developing new initiatives with others within the foundation and also outside with the other funding agencies. If I could do that, there was a good chance I could get whatever we were being taxed. I could get that back to help support material research. 

I would tell my friends that I had actually done quite well because we were always getting at least what the tax was plus a little bit extra. Clearly, I was doing well at selling the new initiatives. Again, what I will do this evening is tell you about one of those initiatives that is called Materials Genome Initiative. Now, I'm going to answer the question that everybody is going to ask at the end. I'll answer it now. How on earth did we end up with the name Materials Genome Initiative? I have to tell you that the group I met with there, we spent many, many hours trying to come up with a name. We were actually meeting one day, and one of the certain leaders of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House wandered then to our meeting. He said, "I hear you've been struggling with coming up with a name for this initiative. I've been talking to some others around the building. We like Materials Genome Initiative because people understand about the genome initiative, so they'll understand the Materials Genome Initiative. 

That's the name that you're going to work with. Figure out what goes behind it, and make it really good." That was how we ended up with the name. Our job then was to come up with what was inside behind that name. Let me tell you why and how these initiatives come about. Now, people wonder do we just dream them up or where did it come from. They actually come from our discussions with the people that we support nationally. They help drive where the new initiatives would be. You can think of the committees that work on this is they tend to take ideas from many different sources. Put them together, and try and find a new direction for Science. Many of you may remember the Nanotechnology Initiative. 

It came about the same way this one did. What people were doing as they realized that there were different areas that if we took them all together and made them into one, we could actually have a much better package than each of them I think separately. That's what we we're going to do. Now I'm going to show you why the timing was right for forming this group to come up with this initiative. If we actually will take a look at just the energy technologies, and we save what are some of the main roadblocks that we actually have, what you guy find out is that materials are in fact one of the primary roadblocks that we have in advancing these technologies. The technologies and the materials advances that we need to make, we're not going to get there by doing incremental advances in the material properties. We're actually going to require materials' properties are orders of magnitude superior to anything that we can make today. That is immediate challenge. If you think of how long we've actually had the solar cell, was 100 years, right, but think about how much that the solar cells count for an energy generation today, but we've known about them for 100 years. It seems true with rechargeable batteries, but we still are working in improving those batteries. 

If we could actually make materials that could operate at higher temperatures, we could increase the efficiency of all of the fossil fuel generating plants. If you think of what that means in terms of how well do I consume fossil fuels, if we could actually use them to generate electricity more efficiently, we will use less. That is becoming more and more important. Of course, if we look at nuclear fuels, we have the problem what we're going to do with all that waste. Although we've known about these technologies for a long time, they still haven't reached their potential. The real limit if you look at it, materials is a big part of that limit. Let me give you some other examples. If we actually look at the next generation of nuclear reactors that we would like to build, they're called Generation IV Nuclear Reactors. You'll see somewhere in this chart generation two and generation three reactors. You will notice that they are down in the bottom left-hand corner of the chart. 

What the chart shows you is the temperature, so that the operating temperatures of your nuclear reactor are on the bottom. It says, "Displacements per atom." What this means is that the materials, the structural materials that are inside your reactor, those elements are going to be displaced from their latest position by that number of time. You can see along that chart we're saying that will be displaced anywhere up to 200 times, right? You can imagine knocking something off. It's like to say 200 times in the lifetime is a lot. Why show you this chart? Well, if you noticed where we are with generations two and generation three systems, we're typically talking about an operating temperature of about 300, 350 degrees. We're talking about the number of times the atoms are going to be displaced for them sized by about 50 to 70 times during the lifetime. The new reactors that we want to build, some of them will operate a thousand degrees centigrade. The number of times that each atom is going to be displaced from its site will approach 200 times. These systems are going to operate for 80 years. Our original reactor designs were only all supposed to run 30 years. 

Now, we're going to design systems that will operate for 80 years. We're going to ensure the structural integrity of those materials as a major challenge. Do we have those materials today? No, we don't have them. There is just too challenging, a problem for us. If you consider the environment, the code that we're going to use in the reactor and how they're going to react with those materials. Can we guarantee that they're going to operate safely for 100 years or 80-year timeframe? Not today, we don't have those materials, but we actually need to find them, to make them, to test them, and to certify them. We're going to have to do that in a rather short timeframe. I'll show you in a few minutes what I mean by a short timeframe. If we consider about transportation and how much fuel that we consume in the U.S., could we improve the efficiency? Well, it turns out if you look at what's mostly in your car, you'll notice that it's mostly going to be steel and iron. If we could actually reduce the weight, that for every percent reduction, 10% reduction could weight of each vehicle, we will save about 67% in fuel consumption. 

If you remember just how much fuel we actually import in to the U.S. in order to power our transportation flee, a 67% would be a big saving. One of the things we'd like to try in there is can we figure out how to reduce the amount of steel and the amount of iron that's in the vehicles because that's where the weight is. Now, you as consumers are going to demand that those vehicles are equally safe today, or the future ones are as safe as the ones we have today. You will now be concerned about how we're actually going to get this weight reduction. Of course, there is a limit to how much we can reduce the weight of the car, so there is a lower limit to what we can do. I believe you drive a hybrid or a Prius. There's always quite a few of you. Have you ever thought about the batteries that are in your car? You actually have a large supply of the world's rare earth elements at all of your hybrid vehicles that you're driving. This just shows you the Toyota Prius and some of the rare earth elements that are actually used in the production of that car. Now, why should I show you this? Well, if I look at where most of the rare earth elements exist today, they're not in the U.S., right? The world supply, you'll notice that we get 91% of our supply from China. 

That brings us with the problem if we don't control the supply. Yet, we're heavily dependent on them for not only the magnets are in their car, but also in the wind turbines that we're starting to use. The supply and the sort of long-term safety and security of that supply is a major issue not only for us, but for other countries as well. We're going to have to think of other ways that we can replace those rare earth elements, and still maintain the same properties and performance. You may see us as a way of taking your Prius, and taking it apart, and actually recovering element that's in there today so that we can reuse it. As engineers, we don't design for that today. We design for performance. We don't design for recovery, a complete recovery of all the elements so that we could reuse them. We probably will have to in the future. If you've ever thought about the world's food supply, our population is growing. 

We are going to be challenged by how are we going to provide enough food to feed the world. We rely heavily on phosphates, but if you look at where the phosphates are, you've got Morocco, China are the primary sources. If you ask how long is that supply going to last, the estimate is something like 70 to 75 years. What are we going to do? How are we going to live without food? Everybody fertilize the earth in order that we can grow it. There's no substitute in this case. Now, I'm sure you've seen the pictures where if you look in the runoff or you look in the estuaries as they go out to sea, you'll see the plumes that are caused by having the phosphates run off, or the nitrates running off from the fields. There is a challenge that we're going to face in the future. How are we going to find the fertilizers that we will use in order to produce enough for the nation, not just us, but for everyone. If you look at indium, and indium tin oxide, you'll be used to seeing this actually on all of your flat panel TVs that you have at home, on your computer screens. It's not classified yet as being a critical element, one that's in short supply, but a rate at which we are consuming it is going to become a problem. 

The deposition process that we use for laying down indium tin oxide is 30% efficient. Seventy percent of it that we use is actually waste. We're going to have to find out new ways of recovering that. We're going to have to find ways of recovering that material that's in your TV. We're going to have to find replacements and alternatives because we can't keep relying on these materials. If you look at the evolution of solar cells, now this is maybe too small for you to see, but all I really want you to look at here is the length of the linings that you see. What you'll notice is that many of these technologies started in the 1970s. We're still trying to improve in the performance of them today. It's a long way in order to go from the fast device we make in our lab till you see it in a product. We're still trying to improve on our efficiencies of some systems today. 

If you are actually to go back through and take a look at many of the materials that you will recognize, if you look at the length of each of these bars, you'll notice that they're all very common in length. They're all going to tell you that you've got 18 to 20 years from the time we discovered them in our labs to the time they'll make it out into a product. If you're in the electronic industry, you may actually come in with a shorter timeframe, but for the most part, an 18 to 28 year discovery to product time is quite normal. Now, if you think it back to some of the things that we said about how quickly do we need to replenish our energy supply if it takes us 20 years or 30 years to get new material certified, and we are looking at having to generate more energy say by 2050, by 2060, we don't have much time to make and find those new materials. That's why when we met with all the different federal agencies, we decided that time was good to launch the Materials Genome Initiative. It was actually announced by President Obama at Carnegie Mellon University in June 2011. What we're going to try and do in this initiative is we will find new materials twice as fast as we do it today. Not only find them, but get them into a product twice as fast as we do it. We're also going to find and produce them twice as cheaply as we do today. Those are quite bold targets, but if you think of what it will give American manufacturers in terms of competitiveness, we believe that this is a way forward to ensure our leadership in engineering and then in technologies. 

Why did we think it was the right time for us to launch this initiative? Well clearly, there is a demand from the technology side. We need new materials, new breakthroughs. Why did we think we can do it twice as fast and twice as cheap as we've done it before? We've seen in the last 10, 15 years an incredible progress in the computational part that we have. I'm sure many of you will remember the first calculators you owned, and what it could actually achieved compared to what you can do within your cell phone today. If you think of your first PC that you had, what it could do and how much storage capacity you now have within your cell phone. If you think of what we can do in a computer now, it's just amazing. We are approaching a point where we can look for new materials using a computer. We're also advancing in the area of instrumentation and characterization. We're looking in the future where we will be able to use extra sources to what electrons move. Can you imagine if we can actually look at a femtosecond time scale, watch electrons move, figure out how they behave, then learn how to manipulate them so that we can actually force them to move in directions that they normally don't want to move? If we understand how they behave, how they interact collectively, then can we force them in new directions so we get new materials with new properties? We believe we can. 

The other part that we believe says that the time is right for launching this initiative is we generate a massive amount of data daily with all of the research that we do. All of us have dates in our labs that is never going to appear anywhere. This is just going to stay in our labs. If you could imagine having all of that data on a computer facility that all of us could access, that all of us could search, could we start looking at each other's data in finding unusual behaviors where those old results that we thought were that's very intriguing. We weren't quite able to reproduce it, so we never published it. Let's say there's four, five group on the world with that same date set, none of us published it because we could never quite reproduce it. If we could start searching each other's data, what could we find? We believe that the time is coming when all of our data will be put online, will be readily accessible to everyone. That we believe will help accelerate how quickly we can actually advance and develop new material systems. How are we going to do this and move this time down from the 18 to 20 years? How are we going to move it to say 10? If you look at how we look at the discovery of materials in the pathway by which we discover them, we go through a discovery phase, sort of what we make in the lab. We never make enough that's going to be commercially useful. 

We develop it. We optimize its properties and its performance. We then design systems, and we integrate those components together. We have to certify it. We have to certify those new materials and their properties, the devices that we make. We then have to be able to manufacture it. We have to be able to scale up from the size that we started with. Then we have to actually get out to the deployment to you the consumer. In the discussions that we had, we said, "Well, sustainability and recovery are becoming important," but we didn't want to add a number eight, so we left it dangling there. It's just sustainability and recovery that something that we're going off to address as we go forward. 

How are we going to do it? I've already hinted it the way that we will do it. We will take the advances in computational tools, the new algorithms that we are developing. We will use them to explore space for new materials. In the computer, we can explore areas that are inaccessible by experiment. They might be accessible, but the experiments are very difficult and very costly to do. We can actually explore that space using our computer tools. Then only focus on a few examples to verify the computational data. We are developing those new algorithms. We will develop the new experimental tools that will allow us to explore the physics and the chemistry and the properties at the size of the scale of the electrons. We will be able to build systems with knowledge from that point. 

We will take advantage of all of the data that we generate in our labs, and companies generate as well. We will make it also accessible. We believe if we do that, we will be able to actually change the time of which it takes to produce a new material, and get it into an application you will see. The idea is that we will build multiple of these platforms, each of the seven stages. We will use computational tools, experimental tools and data to search for new materials with new properties. Now, just recently in the theory side about three to four years ago I believe, we actually figured out that there is something called as a topological insulator. What that means is that the surface skin of the material is conducting, and the rest of the system was an insulator. Today, we actually are making them, so it's no longer a theory. Today, we are making systems that exhibit those properties. The questions that we're now asking is, "Can we use these materials in order to become the next materials we'll use in next generation computers?" If you're familiar Moore's Law, you probably know that we are heading probably towards the end of that doubling that we see. 

We're going to need new materials in order to change how we do that. The question is, "Are these topological insulators, are they the answer?" We believe there's others that are out there that we could find, and we'll do it quicker if we use the computational tools. At the other end of the spectrum, we can think of deployment tools. One of the initiatives that the Department of Energy has, they have a hub at Oak Ridge National Laboratory looking at how we can use computational tools to protect performance of nuclear reactor systems. They're going to take all of the models that we have. Put them together. Find out where we've got deficiencies or weaknesses in those models. Then see if we can predict the performance of a nuclear reactor. Now, you might wonder why would we want to do that for the reactors. When was the last time when we actually built and launched a new nuclear reactor in the U.S.? If you think back, it's been quite a few decades since we actually launched one. 

We originally designed those for 30 years lifetime. That 30 years is up. We're going to run those reactors. I think the next level up, we are probably going to go I think to 60 years lifetime. How are we going to certify that we can move that far? We need the computational tools to do that. That's what the hub will in fact do. That's the only way we can certify and verify that they're going to work is if those models work, but we've never had a reactor system for 60 years. We have to verify that we can do that. These two tools will work together, with the others, you will find the similar platforms, so we will make a total of seven platforms. You may be wondering, "Well, how does that get us to faster and cheaper?" Well, what it does is that normally when we do materials design and deployment, there's a very linear progress that we make. 

That tells me very little discussion and dialogue between the discovery, the manufacturing, and the deployment folks. They tend to all operate in their own space. They don't tend to operate and talk to each other. The idea is that if you have all of these platforms working together with each one informing the other, not in a linear fashion, but in the confusing fashion that you see inside that circle, you can in fact get a more rapid progress towards design and deployment of those materials. What the Materials Genome Initiative will do is we will make these platforms in each of the areas. We will get them to talk and interact with each other. We believe by doing that, we will decrease the time that it takes for us to get discovery of a new material, and put an end to a new system. Let me just touch on what we mean by the tools that we will have in our toolbox. If you actually want to look at where some of the algorithm development has done today, they are discovering new materials. If you look for example at this Density Functional Theory, that code is developed in Europe. 

When our scientists and engineers use that, they are buying it from Europe. That means we're not producing it, and we're not advancing it. We're not the first to be using that new toolbox. In my work, we actually look at failure of materials. We have some algorithms that we share with others. Is that our latest algorithm we're sharing? No. Is it a useful one? Yes. Is it the latest? No because we're still working on it. We are still using it, and still evolving it. We want to be the ones to make the breakthrough. 

With this initiative, our intent is that we will bring back that algorithm development, algorithm advancement back to the U.S., and we will fund it. The idea is that each one from working at the atomic scale all the way up to the micro scale will be linked together, each one informing the other so that you can go from that very basic atom-electron type level all the way up to solid object, and predict its properties. You don't have to measure them. You don't have to do experiments. We'll predict what the properties are. Change something in it. The algorithm will tell you whether it's a good change or it's a bad change. Just think of how we did things before. We used to make many, many materials with slight variations in them, and then test their properties. That was a long time-consuming and costly operation. 

We believe by using these computational tools, we'll be able to do much better. Are we there yet? Will they all work together where we can actually get everything right? The answer is no, but we can. Even the sampling of simplest corrosion, can we actually predict corrosion using these types of approaches? The answer is no. We were still struggling to get between the corrosive liquid and the metal, and understanding the electron exchange between the metal and the liquid. We are working to break down that barrier, so we can predict the performance of materials in a corrosive environment. In the data mining, some of my friends and colleagues would tell you, "We probably have enough data for us to work with just now. You should just let the people to research algorithms, find the correlations that are there." That's in fact not quite right. I mean, we are finding holes in our data sets that we have so that you always have to keep going back through it. We have to learn better how to do data mining, data visualization. We have a huge challenge in storage. 

I'm sure everyone has got ads for cloud storage systems. Some of you are probably using them. If you think of what Google is going to have to do in order to store all the data is actually said that in the future they might need their own nuclear plant right next to their storage unit just for cooling. That's the amount of data we are generating. Think of what the wealth of information that's actually there. Can we actually start accessing it? Our hope is yes, but we have some challenges. We did good method data in front to make sure it's accessible. We're not the area with that good algorithm data or that good method data, but we will be. These are some of the challenges that we face as we move towards looking at the digital data. Experimental tools, I have a lot of friends who are in the computational area. 

They're doing some incredible work commitment, incredible discoveries. I keep saying to them, "Okay, it looks very nice in your computer. How do I get it out of there so I can make something with it?" That's quite a challenge. You can't just put your hand in and pull it out. You actually have to go away and make it somehow. One of the things that we will do as we move forward, we will look for new ways to synthesize and process material systems. We will make new ways. You've probably heard of 3D printing. That's an incredible advance if you think of how we're going to manufacture complex components, minimize waste, minimize energy, optimize use of the raw materials. The idea in the sense and processing part of these experimental tools, we will be looking for the next way to produce materials to scale up the lab productions that we work with to make them commercially viable. 

Then figure out how we can go from there. Remember I said we're getting in the future, we are going to have to think of how we can take all the things we come and throw into the landfill. How can we take all of those and recycle every single component that's in there, and get all of the elements out. It may never appear in that same product again, but we are going to have to move in that direction at some point in the future. We're going to have to think of new ways of synthesizing and processing and manufacturing systems. The initiative is intended to do that. You may have actually heard one of the activities within the college and the university recently is we're a part of what the President Obama announced as the digital manufacturing initiative. What we will be doing there is looking again at how do you optimize the 3D printing process, how do you optimize this small manufacturer requiring 10,000 components, how do you do that with a new design? Our plan and our contribution to this initiative is that we will through CAD drawing or 3D drawing, we will draw the full assembly in the computer. We will then watch how every component moves and interacts with the other, all done inside the computer. Then we'll move it to the printing or to the processing. 

What does that do? Well, it means you don't have to make hundreds and hundreds of prototypes. You're probably going to make it and be successful with one or two prototypes. If we're successful, I think we will be; then this will give U.S. manufacturing a massive competitive edge. As we do those processes though, we're going to have to put censors inside the manufacturing systems that we use. We have to collect the data to make sure it's performing the way it is. We will do that as part of the characterization tools. We will start developing these new tools and capabilities. We believe that all of that together will actually help with the competitiveness. If you look at who's involved in this initiative today or at least where it started, the National Science Foundation was part of it, and both the divisions are the directors of mathematical and physical sciences and the engineering directorates were there. The Department of Defense was then involved in this which is where we're going to develop the standards for gathering the data. 

We need someone to set what the standards will be. This will actually be responsible for doing that. The Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, and Department of Energy, ERE will also be part of it. Industry is also heavily involved in it. In fact, some industries are already doing this. Car manufacturers already use a form of this to design better car engines. If you think of the new Boeing and dreamliner, part of that was actually developed using this type of framework. Not all the way from discovery, but starting towards the latter parts was all done using this kind of framework. We believe that if we move in this direction, we will make that progress that President Obama promised. New materials for the U.S. 

industry produce twice as fast and half the cost that we do today. We think it's a challenge for the materials community and the manufacturing community, but we think we have the right tools and place today in order to enable us to be successful. What we are going to do here on campus is that we have formed Wisconsin Materials Innovation Institute. What they are going to do is that they are going to start bringing together the three elements. We are already working in Engineering to build these platforms. We won't build the 07. We will build one or two in the areas where we have expertise, but we intend to be part of that. In fact in round two of the announcements from the White House, our university was listed as one that was moving forward in launching this kind of effort, so we will be playing in this area. We are also thinking about how we can actually use our characterization tools that we have in this campus. We have tremendous tools available for doing Materials characterization. 

We would like to see us expand that capability, and actually make it a state-wide service. Our tools these days that we have in campus, you can actually be sitting now with your computer out driving one of them. You don't actually have to be in the same location as the tools. We can actually connect you remotely to tools. We think if we can do that across the state, it will give Wisconsin a competitive advantage especially in the area of materials and manufacturing. I thought I would finish with those just to show you where the university and the college of engineering is working towards activities to the Materials Genome Initiative. Now, I should say in finishing if you're looking for Materials Genome Initiative within the National Science Foundation, you won't find it under that name. It actually comes under a completely different name, but it is there. It is in the budget going forward. I think that's a good sign. 

I'm looking forward to the progress that we not only in the college but across our campus will make and develop in these new material systems to address the technological challenges that we face nationally today. With that, let me end. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. [applause]