Kube earns ARPA-E IGNIITE 2024 award for automating alloy discovery

A project led by Sebastian Kube, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected by the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) for an Inspiring Generations of New Innovators to Impact Technologies in Energy 2024 (IGNIITE 2024) award.

IGNIITE supports early-career innovators pursuing disruptive or unconventional ideas that could result in impactful new technologies for energy applications. The program is aimed to help early-stage scientists pursue independent research and address the urgent energy-related challenges currently faced by society. It is the first time the agency has funded an early-career program.

Kube’s project is titled “AlloyBot: Autonomous Platform to Develop Alloys for Energy and Propulsion Technologies 100x Faster.”

Many advanced energy technologies such as gas turbines, jet engines and future nuclear fusion reactors operate at extreme conditions, often including high mechanical stresses, temperatures beyond 1300°C , or intense radiation. Current structural alloys, however, can’t withstand these conditions, meaning new alloys are urgently needed to enable next-generation technologies and improve their efficiency. Traditionally, however, developing and testing alloys is a slow, expensive process that can often take decades.

Kube wants to speed that process up 100 times by combining automation, robotics and artificial intelligence into a system he’s calling AlloyBot. If successful, this autonomous platform will be able to synthesize 100 new alloys per week, examine the microscopic structure of these materials, and test their mechanical performance, all with minimal human assistance.

In particular, AlloyBot will specialize in optimizing the high-temperature processing and structural performance of new alloy classes such as refractory superalloys. This will enable it to rapidly study a broad array of alloys and optimize their performance under extreme operating conditions.

“This is an exciting opportunity to accelerate the development of complex new materials,” says Kube. “Computational methods and AI have already allowed us to identify promising new materials faster. But the process of testing such materials in lab experiments remains expensive and time consuming. Through AlloyBot, we hope to overcome this bottleneck and rapidly optimize new materials by closing the feedback loop with AI.”

Luca Mastropasqua, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was also selected to receive an ARPA-E IGNIITE 2024 award. Read about Mastropasqua’s project.

Read about the other IGNIITE 2024 projects here.