WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
China is increasingly sanctioning the export of rare earth metals which are used in everything from computer chips to batteries, so now there’s a race to replace them.
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It’s no secret that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels – and quickly. But, as China increasingly bans the export of Rare Earth metals in tit for tat measures against the US for their sanctions on Chinese companies, and as companies scramble to replace them with everything from coal ash waste to quantum materials, one of the big concerns surrounding humanity’s breakneck green energy transition is that the electric motors and electric batteries that will power that future need rare earth metals, and asides from the geopolitics involved getting those metals can be disastrous on both environmental and societal levels. For these reasons, as well their overall pricey-ness and scarcity, automakers like Tesla are actively searching for alternative materials to power their growing fleet of EVs.
Simply put, humans don’t have enough time to research alternative materials for our green energy future. But luckily, Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘lives’ life in the fast lane.
A UK tech company called Materials Nexus recently announced, with the help of its AI platform, they’d developed a magnet that’s completely free of rare earth metals. While this isn’t the first such device – other companies have also created “Clean Earth” magnets – they did so after a about decade of trial-and-error. According to Materials Nexus’ press release, the company’s AI platform only took an amazing three months to design its rare earth metal-free creation, MagNex.
“The current industry standard permanent magnet took decades to discover and even longer to develop into the products we use today; MagNex took just 3 months to design, synthesize and test – x200 faster,” the press statement reads. “MagNex can be produced at 20 percent of the material cost and a 70 percent reduction in material carbon emissions (kg CO2/kg), compared to rare earth element magnets currently on the market.”
Materials Nexus worked with the Henry Royce Institute and the University of Sheffield to synthesize and test the magnet. The company said that a similar AI design approach could also revolutionize other facets of the green energy transition, including the design of semiconductors and superconductors. This seems more than possible, as only days before the reveal of MagNex, scientists from the UK and Japan successfully created an iron-based superconducting magnet using AI.
While the arrival of capable AI brings with it much deserved scepticism, as well as job security-induced anxiety, AI is particularly suited to be revolutionary in the field of materials science. According to the Materials Project, an open-source database meant to help support research into new materials, humans discovered 20,000 materials through experimentation – a number that was upped to 48,000 thanks to the dawn of computing.
In late 2023, researchers at the Google-owned Deepmind reported in the journal Nature that its Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME) used those 48,000 materials to then dream up an additional 2.2 million materials – 380,000 of which are considered stable and excellent candidates for synthesis.
Completely transitioning the entire world from fossil fuels to electricity as soon as humanly possible isn’t good enough – luckily, we have an AI ace up our sleeve.
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