The National Science Foundation (NSF) announces the third year of a national materials initiative, Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF).
NSF is interested in activities that accelerate materials discovery and development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to progress towards designing and making a material with a specific and desired function or property from first principles. Also of interest to NSF is research that seeks to advance fundamental understanding of materials across length and time scales to elucidate the effects of microstructure, surfaces, and coatings on the properties and performance of materials and devices.
The DMREF goal is to control material properties through design: this is to be accomplished by understanding the interrelationships of composition, processing, structure, properties, performance, and process control. The approach envisioned to achieve this goal involves modeling, analysis and computational simulations, validated and verified through measurement, experimentation or device demonstration. This requires new data analytic tools and statistical algorithms; advances in predictive modeling that leverage machine learning, data mining, and sparse approximation; data infrastructure that is accessible, extensible, scalable, and sustainable; and new collaborative capabilities for managing large, complex, heterogeneous, distributed data supporting materials design, synthesis, and longitudinal study.
DMREF proposals must be submitted to the Design of Engineering Material Systems (DEMS/PD 12-8086) program with the applicable submission window (15 January to 18 February 2014). The title of the proposal should begin with “DMREF”.
For more information please refer to the announcement link http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14020/nsf14020.jsp