Sandia National Labs Academic Programs Collaboration Report

Sandia and Georgia Tech leverage AI to discover resilient materials and manufacturing processes New discoveries in materials fingerprinting

CONTRIBUTOR Spotlight

Brad Boyce, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, leads the Beyond Fingerprinting Grand Challenge at Sandia, and is collaborating with Remi Dingreville and Georgia Tech on related LDRD projects. Boyce was elected president of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society on March 3, 2022.

A three-year LDRD Grand Challenge at Sandia called “Beyond Fingerprinting” is centered on discovering new resilient materials and manufacturing processes by taking an AI-guided approach that integrates human-subject-matter expertise with algorithms that help interpret complex data streams. Such algorithms, trained on high throughput experiments and simulations, serve as surrogate models that can efficiently detect key “fingerprints” in materials data, predict material performance, and guide effective adaptations for almost every hardware component relevant to DOE and NNSA national security missions. This AI-guided approach acts as a force multiplier for subject matter expert technical knowledge/ experience and should enable agile materials processing and accelerate digital engineering... Sandia principal investigators Brad Boyce and Remi Dingreville, a Sandia staff member who also has an adjunct faculty appointment at GT, who specialize in the mechanics of materials, hypothesize that in-process diagnostics and high-throughput materials characterization contain complex “fingerprints” that can be exploited to accelerate the discovery of robust materials and their manufacturing processes. The goal of this collaboration with GT is to increase materials reliability through a fully digital workflow that integrates process awareness. This AI-guided approach, says Boyce, acts as a force multiplier for subject matter expert technical knowledge/experience and should enable agile materials processing and accelerate digital engineering in support of NNSA’s nuclear security mission.

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report