


Founded in 1998 by a group of leading scientists who seized the opportunity to build a business integrating Computational Materials Science (CMS) with experimental structural databases, Materials Design went on to become one of the first companies to engage in CMS. By connecting science and engineering, they harness the power of critical data and predictive simulations, improving existing materials and discovering new ones to drive global competitiveness.
Materials Design’s MedeA software brings together the best of academic codes with its own developments into a unifying atomistic simulation environment with a graphical interface. This embodies the expertise in how to run the simulations and reasonable defaults for control parameters. “Materials Design combines the paramount codes into the MedeA environment which provides many tools for building models, handling the translation between various codes and providing tools for visualizing and analyzing the results. Where tools do not exist in academia, or where they are inadequate, we develop our own versions,” states Saxe.
The MedeA instrument is a “plug and play” solution, consisting of a 64- or 128-core cluster optimized for the preinstalled and preconfigured version of MedeA.
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Our principal activity is understanding and expanding the range of industrial problems that MedeA can tackle
“Nine of the ten largest chemical companies in the world use Materials Design’s software,” says Saxe. Shortly after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Materials Design was contacted by a Japanese organization—they wanted to develop materials for the in situ adsorption of radioactive Cesium from the environment. Materials Design was able to provide these researchers with state-of-the-art simulation technology to respond to their needs.
Materials Design’s tools are based on fundamental theories such as quantum mechanics, which need a few fundamental physical constants and plenty of compute power to solve the complex equations. The company can create property data of materials from just picking and combining atoms from the periodic table. It is understood that real materials are complex and the task of Materials Design has many facets. “We will continue to work on our tools to make them better, faster and easier-to-use, but increasingly we are working with other companies, using our tools to create the data that they need for their larger scale models,” concludes Saxe.
Company
Materials Design
Headquarters
Angel Fire, NM
Management
Dr. Paul Saxe, CEO
Description
Provides predictive software and powerful computational tools to contract research and development services.