Exciting and far-reaching experiments in sustainable energy have been conducted for the last 100 years in many parts of the world. Many of the initiatives work in their respective regions because of the availability of raw products or intense political will, as seen in Germany's solar effort and France's nuclear policy. Others result from the need to be self-reliant, such as the Brazilian effort to produce ethanol with their plentiful sugarcane crop and the Danish efforts to harvest offshore wind. Many of these experiments have been carried out at a large scale with the goal of producing more than 10–30% of the regions' energy needs.

Advanced techniques can characterize the physical and chemical properties of oil and the porous rock containing it, but the proof is in the drilling. Spills are an inevitable risk, but natural microorganisms that feed off the hydrocarbons can help to clean them up.

Buildings are stealthy contributors to global climate change. The energy needed to heat, cool, and light buildings, as well as manufacture construction materials, contributes more than half of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. But Kevin Surace, chair and CEO of Serious Materials, has made it his mission to tackle the built environment head-on. An electrical engineer by training, he has worked at IBM, Seiko-Epson, National Semiconductor, and General Magic. He later started the companies Air Communications and Perfect Commerce. In 2002, he began to develop sound-muffling polymers as a sideline, shifting his focus to materials chemistry. Sound-dampening materials now account for much of Serious Materials' business, but the company has received most of its accolades for its energy-efficient products. We caught up with Surace at Serious Materials' headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to talk about how materials science can help make green buildings good business.

Designing structural materials for tailored response at extreme conditions is a grand challenge in materials research. Such materials can be made using either “top-down” or “bottom-up” processes to create nanostructured metals and composites that contain atomically designed interfaces that not only block dislocation slip but also attract, absorb, and annihilate point and line defects. Such multifunctional material systems are not just high in strength but also tolerant of damage at extremes of irradiation, temperature, and mechanical stresses, and hence have applications as structural materials in nuclear power and other energy, transportation, and defense technologies. The exploration of these exceptional properties at extremes requires novel and unconventional methodologies, such as in situ experiments with high spatial and temporal resolution, complemented by simulation across multiple length and time scales.

Plastic deformation can effectively produce nanostructured metals and alloys in bulk or surface-layer forms that are suitable for practical structural or functional applications. Such nanostructured materials are porosity-free and contamination-free, and therefore they are ideal for studying fundamental mechanisms and mechanical properties. In this article, we first give an overview of the principles of grain refinement by plastic deformation and an introduction to the reported processing techniques. Then the four most-developed and promising techniques will be described in detail: equal-channel angular pressing, high-pressure torsion, accumulative roll bonding for bulk nanostructured metals, and surface mechanical attrition treatment for nanostructured surface layers.

We review microstructures and properties of metal matrix composites produced by severe plastic deformation of multiphase alloys. Typical processings are wire drawing, ball milling, roll bonding, equal-channel angular extrusion, and high-pressure torsion of multiphase materials. Similar phenomena occur between solids in frictional contact such as in tribology, friction stir welding, and explosive joining. The resulting compounds are characterized by very high interface and dislocation density, chemical mixing, and atomic-scale structural transitions at heterointerfaces. Upon straining, the phases form into nanoscaled filaments. This leads to enormous strengthening combined with good ductility, as in damascene steels or pearlitic wires, which are among the strongest nanostructured bulk materials available today (tensile strength above 6 GPa). Similar materials are Cu-Nb and Cu-Ag composites, which also have good electrical conductivity that qualifies them for use in high-field magnets. Beyond the engineering opportunities, there are also exciting fundamental questions. They relate to the nature of the complex dislocation, amorphization, and mechanical alloying mechanisms upon straining and their relationship to the enormous strength. Studying these mechanisms is enabled by mature atomic-scale characterization and simulation methods. A better understanding of the extreme strength in these materials also provides insight into modern alloy design based on complex solid solution phenomena.

Recent work indicates that materials with nanoscale architectures, such as nanolayered Cu-Nb composites and nanoscale oxide dispersion-strengthened steels, are both thermally stable and offer improved performance under irradiation. Current understanding of the atomic-level response of such materials to radiation yields insights into how controlling composition, morphology, and interface-defect interactions may further enable atomic-scale design of radiation-tolerant nanostructured composite materials. With greater understanding of irradiation-assisted degradation mechanisms, this bottom-up design approach may pave the way for creating the extreme environment—tolerant structural materials needed to meet the world's clean energy demand by expanding use of advanced fission and future fusion power.

The powerful lasers being constructed for inertially confined fusion generate enormous pressures extremely rapidly. These extraordinary machines both motivate the need and provide the means to study materials under extreme pressures and loading rates. In this frontier of materials science, an experiment may last for just 10s of nanoseconds. Processes familiar at ambient conditions, such as phase transformations and plastic flow, operate far from equilibrium and show significant kinetic effects. Here we describe recent developments in the science of metal deformation and phase transitions at extreme pressures and strain rates. Ramp loading techniques enable the study of solids at high pressures (100s of GPa) at moderate temperatures. Advanced diagnostics, such as in situ x-ray scattering, allow time-resolved material characterization in the short-lived high-pressure state, including crystal structure (phase), elastic compression, the size of microstructural features, and defect densities. Computer simulation, especially molecular dynamics, provides insight into the mechanisms of deformation and phase change.

The fundamental processes taking place in metals under extreme conditions can occur on ultrafast timescales (i.e., nanoseconds to picoseconds), and yet their result can continue to have a significant impact on the structural properties for many years to follow. The challenge in developing in situ methods for characterization under extreme conditions therefore involves both the modification of the instrumentation to implement the high-temperature, strain, and radiation conditions and the definition of the timescale over which the measurement must be made. While techniques are well established for characterization of the long-term effects of extreme conditions, experiments are only just beginning to probe the initial stages of structural evolution. This article reviews recent developments in optical, x-ray, and electron probes of metals under extreme conditions and also discusses the needs for future experiments and potential pathways to achieving these goals.

Materials scientists involved in synthesis are exceptionally skilled at designing and constructing individual molecules with the goal of introducing rationally tailored chemical and physical properties. However, the task of assembling such special molecules into organized, supramolecular structures with precise, nanometer-level organizational control to execute specific functions presents a daunting challenge. Soft and hard matter suitable for unconventional types of electronic circuitry represents a case in point and, in principal, offer capabilities not readily achievable with conventional silicon electronics. In this context, “unconventional” means circuitry that can span large areas, can be mechanically flexible and/or optically transparent, can be created by large-scale, high-throughput fabrication techniques, and has atomic-level tunability of properties. In the process of preparing, characterizing, and fabricating prototype devices with such materials, we learn many new things about the electronic and electrical properties of the materials and the interfaces between them. This account briefly overviews recent progress in three interconnected areas: (1) organic semiconductors for complementary π-electron circuits, (2) soft matter high-κ gate dielectrics for organic and inorganic electronics, and (3) metal-oxide semiconductors as components in such devices. Space limitations allow only touching upon selected highlights in this burgeoning field.