The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced on August 17, 2022, that it is collaborating with Northwestern University to accelerate the development and discovery of new materials by using the world’s first data factory for nanomaterials. This new, cutting-edge methodology reaches much further than the standard trial and error research process.
Increasing Green Production and Efficiency
The main goal of using AI to find solutions for green production and efficiency is to meet demands for mobility while also reducing carbon. The initial use of the data factory is aimed at making fuel cell vehicles more efficient. However, TRI and Northwestern also expect this research methodology to have a wide range of effects in the future, including impacts on clean hydrogen protection and removing CO2 from the air and from solar cells. According to TRI’s senior director of energy and materials, the partnership with Northwestern will help decrease lead times on testing and discovering new materials to help reduce transportation carbon.
Empowering the Scientific Community
The need to accelerate the clean energy transition is what’s behind this groundbreaking research collaboration between TRI and Northwestern. The importance of finding and developing critical materials can no longer be left up to slower traditional methods. To this end, TRI and Northwestern have developed a unique machine learning algorithm that can synthesize materials at incredible speeds. This enables it to go through the new mega libraries at Northwestern and investigate more thoroughly and quickly than ever before. This effectively creates a nanomaterial data factory, which is the first of its kind. The goal is to find different materials for clean energy instead of expensive and rare materials like platinum and iridium.
Clean Transition
In order to truly transition to efficient and affordable clean energy, it’s important that the materials used do not cause undue damage to the environment and are affordable to find and use. The current problem, as mentioned above, is that many of the clean energy materials used now are in fact rare and expensive. This makes it more difficult to truly transition into a period of green energy on a large scale. With many automakers discontinuing combustion-engine vehicles and adding EV models, it’s more important than ever to find efficient and affordable ways to do this. When buyers head to a Toyota dealer in the near future, they will likely expect to find plenty of EV models to choose from at affordable prices.
The benefits of this research collaboration between TRI and Northwestern may be coming soon to a Toyota dealer near you in the form of more EV offerings and more efficient EV offerings.
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