Advanced Materials For Engineering

In modern #defensetechnology—from F‑35 fighter jets and Arleigh Burke destroyers to Virginia‑class submarines—rare earth elements like #neodymium (Nd), #praseodymium (Pr), #samarium (Sm), #dysprosium (Dy), #terbium (Tb), #lanthanum (La), #gadolinium (Gd), and #yttrium (Y) are absolutely critical. These elements enable high-performance magnets, precision guidance systems, radar arrays, lasers, and more—components at the heart of U.S. military superiority. Yet today, China remains the dominant global producer, accounting for around 270,000 metric tons—nearly six times the U.S. output (~45,000 metric tons). Worse still, #China controls ~90% of processing and refining capacity—and continues to exert strategic leverage through export restrictions. Here’s what the U.S. is doing to change that: • Moutain Pass Mine (California) – Operated by MP Materials it’s the only rare earth mine in the U.S., supplying elements like neodymium, praseodymium, lanthanum, and cerium. • Brook Mine (Wyoming) – Developed by Ramaco Resources, Inc., this site holds a vast deposit—including Nd, Pr, Sm, Dy, Tb—and represents the first new rare earth mine in the U.S. in 70 years. • Round Top Project (Texas) – A heavy rare earth element (HREE) deposit with unprecedented scale—housing 16 of the 17 rare earths—including all of our spotlights. Though not yet operational, it’s a critical candidate for future supply. While the U.S. works to develop these domestic sources, China still leads the world in the mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing supply chain . That dominance poses a direct strategic vulnerability. What’s changing? • The Pentagon has invested hundreds of millions into MP Materials—including a $400M stake and support for a 10,000‑ton magnet manufacturing facility—to build domestic capacity and break China’s stranglehold. • The Brook Mine is primed to deliver a fresh U.S. source of critical rare earths, injecting resilience into our defense supply chain. ⸻ ** Why This Matters:** 1. National Security – Rare earths are foundational to modern defense systems. Without secure, reliable access, U.S. military readiness is at risk. 2. Supply Chain Resilience – Reducing reliance on a single foreign source—especially one that can weaponize its market dominance—is non-negotiable. 3. Strategic Sovereignty – Investment in Mountain Pass, Brook Mine, and Round Top empowers the U.S. to produce and refine what it needs, here at home. ⸻ #RareEarth #CriticalMinerals #DefenseIndustry #SupplyChainResilience #USMining #MPMaterials #BrookMine #RoundTop #NationalSecurity #Neodymium #Praseodymium #Samarium #Dysprosium #Terbium #Lanthanum #Gadolinium #Yttrium

Relatively small amounts of critical minerals underpin trillions of dollars in economic value globally. New IEA analysis highlights growing risks, including export controls, although countries are also taking steps to make supply chains more secure 👉 https://iea.li/4aTpQ33 The geographic concentration of critical mineral supply chains continues to grow, particularly for refining. Rare earths are the exception. The top supplier's share fell from 90% in 2023 to 85% in 2025, showing progress is possible with strong policies. Read more in the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 👉 https://iea.li/4bNpwDh While critical mineral projects are being announced & developed across the globe, we see a structural imbalance in diversification efforts. Investment outside the dominant supplier remains concentrated in mining, while efforts to expand refining & downstream capacity lag behind. In a complex geopolitical environment, critical minerals have moved to the forefront of countries’ energy, economic & national security agendas. This is making a difference: public finance commitments more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, reaching $65 billion. New IEA analysis also sees a major opportunity to diversify supplies of strategic minor minerals. The investment needed is much smaller than the potential risks of disruption and can be seen as economic insurance. Since #CriticalMinerals account for a small share of final product prices, the cost of diversification could have a limited impact on consumers. For example, critical minerals account for around a quarter of battery cell costs but only about 3% of the price of an average EV. Diversified supply is not only a matter of investment: it also means tackling gaps in technology, equipment & workforce skills. Our new Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 includes guidance for policymakers on this & more. Read it in full on our site 👉 https://iea.li/4bNpwDh

Rare earth elements are the backbone of the technologies shaping a sustainable future including electric vehicles and wind turbines, yet today, less than 1% are recycled. With China’s latest export controls on rare earth minerals disrupting global supply chains, securing these critical materials has never been more urgent. Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund is committed to investing in advanced sustainability technologies that create new markets and solutions and ensure supply chain resiliency. This is especially important right now with the export controls because developing a new mine outside of China can take up to 15 years. But what if we could recover rare earth elements more efficiently through recycling? That’s where our investment in Cyclic Materials comes in. Their groundbreaking recycling process is revolutionizing the recovery of rare earth elements. By strengthening local supply chains and reducing environmental impact by 63% compared to traditional mining, they’re keeping critical materials in circulation—helping to build a more resilient and sustainable economy.

How do materials fail, and how can we design stronger, tougher, and more resilient ones? Published in #PNAS, our physics-aware AI model integrates advanced reasoning, rational thinking, and strategic planning capabilities models with the ability to write and execute code, perform atomistic simulations to solicit new physics data from “first principles”, and conduct visual analysis of graphed results and molecular mechanisms. By employing a multiagent strategy, these capabilities are combined into an intelligent system designed to solve complex scientific analysis and design tasks, as applied here to alloy design and discovery. This is significant because our model overcomes the limitations of traditional data-driven approaches by integrating diverse AI capabilities—reasoning, simulations, and multimodal analysis—into a collaborative system, enabling autonomous, adaptive, and efficient solutions to complex, multiobjective materials design problems that were previously slow, expert-dependent, and domain-specific. Wonderful work by my postdoc Alireza Ghafarollahi! Background: The design of new alloys is a multiscale problem that requires a holistic approach that involves retrieving relevant knowledge, applying advanced computational methods, conducting experimental validations, and analyzing the results, a process that is typically slow and reserved for human experts. Machine learning can help accelerate this process, for instance, through the use of deep surrogate models that connect structural and chemical features to material properties, or vice versa. However, existing data-driven models often target specific material objectives, offering limited flexibility to integrate out-of-domain knowledge and cannot adapt to new, unforeseen challenges. Our model overcomes these limitations by leveraging the distinct capabilities of multiple AI agents that collaborate autonomously within a dynamic environment to solve complex materials design tasks. The proposed physics-aware generative AI platform, AtomAgents, synergizes the intelligence of LLMs and the dynamic collaboration among AI agents with expertise in various domains, incl. knowledge retrieval, multimodal data integration, physics-based simulations, and comprehensive results analysis across modalities. The concerted effort of the multiagent system allows for addressing complex materials design problems, as demonstrated by examples that include autonomously designing metallic alloys with enhanced properties compared to their pure counterparts. We demonstrate accurate prediction of key characteristics across alloys and highlight the crucial role of solid solution alloying to steer the development of alloys. Paper: https://lnkd.in/enusweMf Code: https://lnkd.in/eWv2eKwS MIT Schwarzman College of Computing MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) MIT Industrial Liaison Program MIT School of Engineering

India's Critical Mineral Paradox: Sitting on a Goldmine While Importing at Premium Prices I’ve spent time building businesses across consumer tech, telecom, and industrial sectors. Reading Alkesh Kumar Sharma’s strategic analysis on critical minerals was a wake-up call: India is racing toward clean energy leadership while dangerously dependent on imports for the very minerals that make it possible. Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/dpjKHMsb This isn't just policy. It's national security and controlling our destiny in the 21st century economy. The vulnerability: India is 100% dependent on imports for lithium, cobalt, and nickel, over 90% for Rare Earth Elements. China controls 60% of global REE production and 85% of processing. We're targeting 500 GW renewable energy and net zero by 2070, while handing veto power over our clean energy future to geopolitical competitors. Having run P&Ls across markets, I know 100% import dependence isn't a supply chain. It's a strategic chokepoint. But India is sitting on untapped wealth. Geological Survey identified 5.9 million tonnes of lithium in J&K, significant REE deposits in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Yet mining contributes just 2.5% to GDP versus 13.6% in Australia. We have only 1% of global REE processing capacity. The government launched the National Critical Minerals Mission with ₹34,300 crore and auctioned 20 mineral blocks. The 2023 Mines Act opened private exploration. But execution determines everything. The urban goldmine: India generates 4 million tonnes of e-waste annually, only 10% formally recycled. Inside? The same minerals we're importing at massive cost. Attero proves what's possible. This Noida-based deeptech company achieves over 98% extraction efficiency in recovering rare earths like neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium, the exact elements we currently import. With over 200 patents filed and strong profitability, Attero’s revenue crossed approximately ₹1,000 crore in FY25, growing more than 50% year-on-year. The company works with all leading auto and battery manufacturers and is now expanding capacity sixfold to process 3 lakh tonnes annually, backed by significant capital infusion across India, Poland, and the US. India banned black mass exports, powder from shredded batteries we exported as cheap scrap to China, Korea, Japan who sold it back at 15-20x the price. This ban forces domestic refining. Attero proves we have the technology. The window is closing. If we don't build resilient supply chains through domestic mining, processing, and recycling, we're building our clean energy future on someone else's foundation. We have deposits, waste streams, and companies like Attero proving Indian technology competes globally. What we need is execution speed. #CriticalMinerals #CleanEnergy #AtmanirbharBharat #Sustainability #India

AI isn’t just writing code anymore. It’s inventing matter. Material science used to be painfully slow — 10–20 years from discovery to deployment. What do you think about this animation? AI flipped that timeline. Today: • ML models screen millions of material candidates in days, not decades • Databases like the Materials Project now contain 150,000+ computed materials ready for AI-driven discovery • AI-accelerated simulations run 100–1,000× faster than traditional quantum methods • In batteries alone, AI has helped identify materials that cut discovery cycles by ~70% • Autonomous labs can test hundreds of formulations per week, learning in real time This is how we get: + higher-density, longer-life batteries + aerospace alloys that are lighter and stronger + chips with better thermal performance at smaller nodes + low-carbon cement, recyclable plastics, and rare-element replacements The next breakthroughs in AI, energy, climate tech, and hardware won’t come from software alone. They’ll come from materials designed by AI. We’re no longer just training models. We’re training the building blocks of reality. #AI #MaterialScience #DeepTech #AdvancedManufacturing #Semiconductors

It was great to join Sara Eisen and Carl Quintanilla on CNBC’s Money Movers to talk about what I call the “business issue of our time.”   For three decades, the world has relied on a rare earth supply chain that runs almost entirely through China. That dependency has become a point of geopolitical leverage. Now is the time for the private sector to step up and go anti-fragile, to strengthen the supply chain outside China and ensure that the materials powering our economy and our national security are made here at home.   At USA Rare Earth, we’re doing exactly that — mining in Texas, processing in Colorado, manufacturing magnets in Oklahoma, and bringing proven metal-making expertise through our acquisition of Less Common Metals. Together, we’re building a true mine-to-magnets capability for America and its allies.   The opportunity ahead isn’t just industrial, it’s generational. This is about resilience, innovation, and leadership.   Watch the full CNBC conversation here: https://lnkd.in/eFGGaexy   #Leadership #Innovation #Manufacturing #RareEarths #SupplyChain #USARareEarth #CNBC

Professor Kwanyong Seo held up a solar cell and his colleagues saw a window. A piece of glass you could look through. His team at UNIST in South Korea had spent years on a problem most engineers treated as settled. Solar panels are opaque, heavy, and ugly. Buildings tolerate them on roofs. Nobody wants them on a glass facade. Seo's group moved the electrical contacts to the back of the cell, so the front looked like ordinary glass. They built it. A transparent crystalline silicon solar cell with all contacts on the rear side. Glass that absorbs ultraviolet and infrared light while letting visible light pass through. The numbers: ↳ 12.93% power conversion efficiency ↳ 57% visible light transmission ↳ Previous best for transparent silicon cells: roughly 2% For context, Michigan State's best transparent solar cell hit about 1% efficiency in 2020. Seo's team reached nearly 13%. Think about that. In a demo, the cell charged a smartphone through a pane of glass in ordinary sunlight. South Korea is betting on this direction, with other teams pushing transparent organic and perovskite films toward commercialization. But Seo's work matters most because it uses silicon, the same material the solar industry already manufactures at scale. Existing factories could adapt. The building you are sitting in right now has windows doing nothing but letting in light. Seo's lab proved those windows could also generate electricity, using a material the industry already knows how to make. What is something in your workspace that you wish did more than just sit there? Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for clear ideas on thriving as AI rises and leadership stays human. Source: Transparent photovoltaic cells and self-powered photodetectors by TiO₂/NiO heterojunction Authors: Led by Professor Joondong Kim (Incheon National University, Korea) Journal: Journal of Power Sources https://lnkd.in/efcT-j6f

🚨 New Washington Post Intelligence Report 🚨 Rare earths, real leverage: China’s minerals strategy bites By Josh Rogin and Kendrick Frankel Key Takeaways: With rare earths, China has the cards - China’s newly announced export restrictions mark a structural escalation in the U.S.–China trade war. Beijing’s move to restrict access to rare-earth minerals, magnets and other critical materials is not a reaction to any single U.S. action but the latest step in a deliberate, years-long strategy to tighten control over materials vital to defense, technology and advanced manufacturing. This is not a tit-for-tat retaliation, it’s industrial statecraft. China aims to convert its dominance in critical materials into enduring leverage over Western economies. - Rare-earth strangulation is already being felt. Despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s diplomatic efforts to negotiate a deal to avoid large scale disruptions, the flow of magnets and other critical components from China has already sharply declined. U.S. defense primes and automakers are drawing down their stockpiles, refurbishing old parts and racing to find substitutes. The pressure extends beyond magnets to industrial diamonds, lithium-ion batteries and other sectors where China dominates global supply chains. - The U.S. response remains fragmented and reactive. Washington is trying to rally allies against Beijing’s supply chokehold, but Europe and Asia are reticent to fully side with the United States. The Trump administration is left with unilateral tools — tariffs, export controls and rhetorical threats — that harm U.S. markets as much as they pressure China. Beijing may conclude, perhaps mistakenly, that President Donald Trump will avoid actions that cause immediate pain, diluting U.S. deterrence. - Corporate America is unprepared. American industry is scrambling to onshore rare-earth mining, refining and magnet-making, but building that capacity will take years. In the meantime, manufacturers are cannibalizing supply chains, reusing magnets and hoarding supplies. Trump’s looming sectoral tariffs on semiconductors and high-tech components could deepen the uncertainty, forcing firms to navigate overlapping compliance regimes from Washington and Beijing. Read the entire report here: https://wapo.st/4o8gvJl

Code, Not Rare Earths: How Vimag Labs Is Building the Next Generation of EV Motors Most modern EVs run on Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSMs), which depend on critical minerals such as neodymium and dysprosium. An Indian deep-tech startup believes the answer isn't finding more rare earths, it's eliminating the need for them altogether. Bengaluru-based Vimag Labs has secured its fifth Indian patent for its proprietary Virtual Magnet Synchronous Motor (VMSM) technology, replacing permanent magnets with intelligent software-driven electromagnetic control. ✅ Technology Behind the Breakthrough Instead of embedding expensive permanent magnets inside the rotor, Vimag's architecture generates the required magnetic field electronically using advanced control systems. The platform combines 3 key technologies: - Brushless rotating transformer-based excitation - Advanced power electronics - Real-time control software that continuously adjusts magnetic performance based on driving conditions ✅ Beyond Passenger Cars: A Multi-Sector Opportunity Vimag's technology isn't being developed solely for passenger vehicles. - Urban Mobility - Two-wheelers - Passenger EVs - OEM Validation Industrial Scale - Commercial Vehicles - Heavy Equipment - Robotics - Defence Systems - 200–600 kW Platforms ✅ Hidden Advantage Isn't Just Supply Chains - Much of the discussion around rare-earth-free motors focuses on reducing dependence on imported materials. But there is another advantage that receives far less attention: thermal reliability. Traditional permanent magnets gradually lose magnetic strength when exposed to prolonged high temperatures, reducing long-term motor performance. - A software-controlled electromagnetic system eliminates that limitation. Instead of relying on fixed magnetic materials, VMSM continuously adjusts electrical excitation in real time, maintaining stable performance across varying loads and operating temperatures. - As EV adoption expands into increasingly demanding environments, thermal stability may become just as valuable as supply-chain independence. ✅ Let me share the #Rajspectives 1. The future of electric mobility won't be defined only by better batteries. Motor technology is becoming an equally important frontier. 2. As governments and manufacturers search for alternatives to concentrated rare-earth supply chains, innovations that reduce dependence on critical minerals will attract increasing strategic attention. 3. Vimag Labs represents a broader shift in Indian deep-tech from assembling imported technologies to creating original intellectual property capable of competing globally. Sometimes the biggest engineering breakthrough isn't discovering a new material. It's designing a smarter system that no longer needs one. #engineering #technology #startup #india #Bangalore