Project Team and Abstract
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Project Leadership Team: Ian Baker, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Engineering, Thayer School of Engineering; Sarah Slotznick, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences; Geoffroy Hautier, Hogdson Family Associate Professor of Engineering, Thayer School of Engineering
The electrification of global energy systems is an essential component of the clean energy transition. Yet the high-performance electric motors and generators that power things like wind turbines and electric vehicles currently rely on magnets made of critical rare-earth materials that are challenging to obtain, costly, and environmentally damaging to extract. Thus, there is an urgent need to find new permanent rare-earth free magnets to power the carbon-free energy transition.
Historically, identifying new materials has been slow because of the time-consuming experiments needed to identify and characterize thousands of potential candidates. The project team was recently awarded an Irving Institute seed grant to support new work that will combine a theory-driven computational screening with experimental synthesis and characterization to accelerate the search for new rare-earth-free permanent magnets. "Such a new magnet will be a game-changer to our transition towards a society relying less on fossil fuels," explains the team in the project proposal. If successful, the team envisions the potential of this project to lead to the commercialization of a new low-cost, rare-earth-free permanent magnet within 5 to 10 years.