SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Using a novel mathematical approach, a team of MIT researchers developed a domain-specific programming language [phys.org] for generating custom materials based on a set of design specifications. The software, dubbed Matriarch for "Materials Architecture", allows users to combine and rearrange material building blocks in almost any conceivable shape.

The work suggests that engineers will be able to reach the next stage of materials design through fundamental control of a protein's final assembled structure.

"Matriarch could very well be the core of a new molecular design process, where engineering decisions can be made at arbitrary scales," says Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) postdoc Tristan Giesa '15, co-author of the study. "The idea is to start at ground level. If engineers require a polymer material to have specific properties—strength, resilience, size to name a few—then we need to question what must be done at a fundamental level to achieve these properties."

With Matriarch engineers can explore what happens to a material's properties when its architecture changes. Accessible as an open source Python library, the program will ultimately be used as a tool for engineers to quickly discover new materials and design them according to their needs.

More detail and a brief code snippet available in the article.

Original Submission