Proceedings of MATSUS Fall 2024 Conference (MATSUSFall24)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsusfall.2024.264
Publication date: 28th August 2024
From solar photovoltaics to batteries to sustainable fuels, many advances in renewable energy technology are enabled by the availability of high-quality functional materials. In the past decade, innovations such as computational materials design and combinatorial synthesis techniques have rapidly expanded our ability to predict new materials, screen for targeted properties, and identify promising candidates to accelerate the energy transition.
However, although the goal of many of these studies is to contribute to global sustainability, rarely do scientists explicitly include sustainability metrics in early-stages of the materials design process. Often, life cycle assessments (LCAs) are not performed until after a material or device has been scaled up to high technology readiness levels (TRLs), at which it may be too late to make significant changes (this is a phenomenon known as “technology lock-in”). The exclusion of life cycle design at early stages is likely not intentional, but rather because we have not yet established the tools and infrastructure to do so, and because of the disconnects between the fields of materials science and life cycle assessment.
In this talk, I will discuss the promises and challenges of integrating life cycle assessment into early-TRL materials design and discovery. I will give a brief overview of what LCA can and cannot do, share tools I have developed to connect the brightway LCA infrastructure to materials design infrastructure, and discuss case studies from my research on inorganic solar materials (focusing specifically on the role of process uncertainty). Lastly, we’ll look towards the future and explore how the materials scientist community can center life cycle thinking in our own research.