MARVEL Industrial Newsletter

June 2018

We are pleased to send you the third issue of the Industrial Newsletter of the NCCR MARVEL, the Swiss Center on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. With EPFL as the leading house, MARVEL is currently involving 35 principal investigators across 12 Swiss academic institutions.

We are interested in developing broad industrial partnerships focused on the discovery of materials with specific properties or on new methodological approaches, over a medium- to long-term perspective. Do not hesitate to contact us for more information.

You can also follow us on Twitter, at @nccr_marvel, or play around with the ever growing amount of data, services, and tools available on the Materials Cloud (http://materialscloud.org).

Moreover, with the new GDPR regulation enacted, we want to remind you that

1. in terms of personal data, we only store your first name, last name, organization and email address to which this newsletter is sent;

2. you are receiving this newsletter because you have been in contact with MARVEL or have subscribed to it. If you think that you have been involved by error or if you no longer wish to receive it, you can unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of this email. Let us know if you also want to have your data removed from our database.

Nicola Marzari, Director of the NCCR MARVEL
Pascale Van Landuyt, Industrial Liaison & Tech Transfer Officer

Breaking News

The partnership signed will allow to develop atomic-scale modeling to increase researchers’ understanding of key chemical reactions and optimize the properties of the composites involved (©NCCR MARVEL)

EPFL and Solvay team up on an atomic-scale modeling project

EPFL — through the National Centre of Competence in Research MARVEL — recently signed an agreement with the firm Solvay. The aim of this partnership is to use quantum modeling to gain greater insight into physical and chemical phenomena and predict innovative materials and composites with a promising range of properties.

ChemAlive - MARVEL collaboration wins grant to boost machine learning approaches to real-time chemical and reaction modelling

Founded in December 2014, ChemAlive (www.chemalive.com) has already gained contract business with customers such as Biosynth in Switzerland and internationally with Saudi Aramco (Aramco Services Center) to validate quantum chemistry in an industrial setting and guide the design of specific on-line tools to be launched as a software as a service (SaaS) in the third quarter of 2018. ChemAlive has also won the support of influential start-up accelerators, taking away the Gold Award, for example, from the MassChallenge Accelerator.

Web platform “Materials Cloud” could help industry streamline research efforts

Materials Cloud (www.materialscloud.org), a new web platform developed to help computational materials scientists share their work and promote open science, may also offer advantages to industrial partners more concerned with IP.

Follow MARVEL
@nccr_marvel

Scientific Highlight

The image shows the two-dimensional TiO2 structure with its hexagonal lattice in the top left with the incident photons represented by a beam of light. As water molecules enter from the bottom left, they dissociate into their constituents, O2 and H2.

2D or not 2D? MARVEL algorithm answers the question

Two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, are a new and exciting class of materials. No more than a few atomic layers thick, they have the most extraordinary properties, making them attractive for all kinds of applications. However, despite high expectations, progress in identifying new 2D materials has been slow: to date, only a few dozen have been identified experimentally. In their just-out Nature Nanotechnology paper, which made the cover page, "Two-dimensional materials from high-throughput computational exfoliation of experimentally know compounds", a team led by MARVEL director Nicola Marzari takes a computational route towards improving that count.

The latest version of AiiDA 0.12.0 is available!

Upcoming Events

EPFL Rolex Learning Center. Photo by Alain Herzog

International Workshop on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials

Sep 10, 2018, 9:00 until Sep 12, 2018, 12:40, EPFL

Visit the COMDI 2018 website! The International Workshop on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials, open to the international community active in the field of MARVEL, will take place on September 10-12, 2018 at the SwissTech Convention Center, Lausanne. Registration is extended until 20 June 2018.

CCMX – NCCR MARVEL Materials Science Day 2018

Oct 04, 2018, from 9:40 until 17:00, Welle 7, Bern

Make sure to network with colleagues from the materials science scene in Switzerland! The NCCR MARVEL and CCMX are co-organizing their second Materials Science day, featuring both experimental and modelling approaches to current challenges in materials science.