A team of researchers, which includes a Northwestern professor and graduate student, has recently formulated an algorithm that is the first to predict the mechanical behavior of glass at different temperatures.

“The current process of materials discovery can take decades,” said Sinan Keten, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, in a news release. “Our approach scales molecular simulations up by roughly a thousand times, so we can design materials faster and examine their behavior.”

Keten and Nitin Hansoge, a third-year engineering graduate student, are two of the six people listed as authors on the paper. Keten was also a co-leader of the research.

The discovery was published in a study entitled “Energy renormalization for coarse-graining polymers having different segmental structures” and was printed by Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal.

“As simple as glass looks, it’s a very strange material,” Keten said in the release. “These processes take a very long time to compute in molecular simulations. Speeding up computations is only possible if we can map the positions of the molecules to simpler structural models.”

The algorithm is named the “energy renormalization algorithm.” With this new formula, scientists can create coarse-grained models and may be able to discover new materials faster.

Three tests have been done to confirm the algorithm, and each time, the formula results in correct predictions.

“Explaining the physics of glasses has famously been one of the biggest problems that scientists haven’t been able to solve,” Keten said. “We’re getting closer to understanding their behavior and solving the mystery.”

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