For the last several decades, a single type of powerful magnet has dominated the market. Now, researchers at the University of Houston and Rice University, backed by the federal government, are working to develop a new generation of magnets, which they say could reshape much of the nation's supply chain.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded the research team $2.88 million to use artificial intelligence to develop a formula for a new powerful magnet. AI could reduce the trial-and-error nature of such a project.
"What we’re effectively doing is trying to bake a cake without a recipe," Jakoah Brgoch, a UH professor who is leading the team, toldHouston Public Media. "We’re sort of coming at this in a way that will take what is really a complex system and reduce it down to minimize the number of trials that we’re going to need to make some of these materials that have been predicted to be really impressive."
For the most part, Brgoch said, magnets are magnets. A magnet on a refrigerator could be the same type of magnet as in an electric vehicle, to a different scale and application. Magnets are in cell phones, headphones, computers, and other essential parts of the American economy.
In the 1980s, two researchers working independently from one anotherdeveloped the strongest magnetknown to exist, called the neodymium-iron-boron magnet. It was commercialized soon after, becoming the magnet of choice for much of the industry.
"If you think back 30 years ago, magnets of the refrigerator might hold up a Christmas card, and over time that magnet would slide down very slowly," Brgoch said. "Or the card would slide down the fridge very slowly, and that doesn't happen anymore. And that's largely been driven by the commercialization of these magnets."
The development of such magnets, though, has become a foreign policy issue. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets require rare earth materials — namely, neodymium — an industry that is largely dominated by China. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, China accounts for roughly 70% of the world's rare earth mining, 90% of its processing, and 93% of its manufacturing.
The Trump Administration has threatened tariffs on China over its control of rare earth materials and magnets. Last year, the administration invested nearly $750 millionwith the goal of producing rare Earth magnets in the U.S.
The Department of Energy's grant to the University of Houston is part of the agency's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E). The goal for Brgoch is simple: APRA-E wants to develop a magnet with twice the power using materials on the market today.
"We're thinking that now we have an opportunity to sort of tie together traditional materials, synthetic chemistry, with advances in AI components and high-performance computing to discover new chemistries that maybe were overlooked," he said.
Brgoch — along with UH's Joshua Bocarsly, Rice University's Geoffroy Hautier, James Neilson of Colorado State University, Carrier Global, and the Houston-based startup Newfound Materials — will spend the next three years studying magnets under the stipulations of the grant.
"If you improve the quality of these magnets, that translates into an efficiency gain everywhere, across different technologies," Hautier said in a press release. "But our optimized search strategy may enable us to also better utilize the types of raw materials here in the U.S. and to spur domestic manufacturing."
Their research, Brgoch said, could reshape much of America's supply chains. Magnetic energy density, he said, corresponds with the size of the magnet. Should the team develop a more powerful magnet, technology could use smaller magnets and get the same energy output, whether it be electric cars or handheld phones or headphones.
"It’s kind of emphasizing the growth of materials chemistry in the Houston area," Brgoch said of the initiative. "In various areas, there’s a huge push towards quantum materials that maybe you’re starting to sort of see come through. And this is right within that. And so Houston’s really going to be positioned well for advanced materials discovery that goes beyond oil and gas."
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