When seeking chemical compounds with just the right properties to create new products, including medical devices, researchers can spend years of trial and error testing them in the lab. To aid researchers in this quest, a team of scientists at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, has created a database to take some of the guesswork out of designing new materials.
They performed systematic analyses of both known and imagined chemical compounds to find their key properties and established a database of the results called the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD)—the largest database in the world of its kind. So far, the database contains analyses nearly 300,000 compounds.
The OQMD is open to the public and can be downloaded online. It allows users to search for materials by composition, create phase diagrams, determine ground state compositions, and visualize crystal structures.
By keeping the database open, they say, more people can use it, adding their own compounds and growing its potential.
