(396c) Accelerating Nanomaterials Research: From Fundamentals to New Synthesis Strategies

Carbon nanoparticles (CNP) are of tremendous interest for clean-energy technology and many other applications in energy management, environmental stewardship, economic resilience, and national security due to the manifold of chemical, mechanical, electronic, and optoelectronic properties they can exhibit. However, practical application of these materials is hampered by current synthesis strategies, which focus on low-pressure, low-throughput techniques that fail to yield material at industrially relevant scales. High-pressure synthesis via detonation holds promise to overcome these challenges, having previously been shown capable of producing kilogram quantities of CNP in under a microsecond. However, this process is poorly tunable and not well understood. In this presentation, I will discuss how machine-learning accelerated simulations can be used to demystify this process – and how resulting insights development of a new high throughput nanocarbon synthesis strategy that can enable far greater tunability.