Conductor base metal design for carbon incorporation via ShAPE technology

The DOE’s Conductivity-enhanced materials for Affordable, Breakthrough Leapfrog Electric and thermal applications (CABLE) initiative seeks to foster a research & development ecosystem to advance the state of the art in novel electrically and thermally conductive materials. These materials are crucial to energy use applications and are expected to enable energy sustainability as the demand for electricity and renewable energy rises. The 2021 CABLE workshop identified the need for basic science research to increase the fundamental understanding of emerging technologies, such as conductivity benefits imparted by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) or graphene in conductor alloys. Under this SBIR program, QuesTek Innovations LLC, a leader in the field of integrated computational materials engineering (ICME), will partner with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to perform characterization and modeling to improve the understanding of conductivity benefits to Cu alloys and enable the design of novel compositions which include carbon as a design parameter. The Phase I program will involve characterization of existing carbon-enhanced alloys and baseline materials to inform modeling efforts which will describe the benefit of CNTs or graphene in Cu to increase the fundamental understanding of this novel class of materials, as well as developing modeling design tools to facilitate the selection of composition and process parameters for material synthesis. In Phase II, QuesTek and PNNL will down-select candidate material compositions which will benefit from ShAPE processing and produce material to validate model predictions, improve their fidelity, and demonstrate the technology. QuesTek will work with industry leaders to identify value-added use-cases to showcase the technology developed under this program and attract future investment for high impact, market disruptive applications.