IIT Madras develops world’s largest AI-based alloy database for sustainable materials discovery

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that will speed up the discovery process of sustainable materials for electric vehicles (EVs), aerospace, renewable energy and marine infrastructure industries. This announcement was shared over an official press note released by IIT Madras.

The project has got funding from the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), DRDO-DIA and the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras. The researchers have built one of the world's largest publicly available databases of advanced metallic alloys by using Large Language Models (LLMs) that will extract and organise scientific information from more than ten thousand research papers. It is available on the Alloy Tattvasar platform and GitHub for researchers, startups and industries.

Elaborating on this research, Rohit Batra, assistant professor, Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, IIT Madras, said, “Artificial intelligence is transforming how we discover new materials. Instead of spending years manually collecting data from thousands of publications, our framework automatically builds structured databases that can be used to identify sustainable materials much faster.”

IIT Madras AI platform details

The IIT Madras team has developed an automatic AI pipeline that can extract information on alloy compositions, manufacturing processes and testing conditions. The framework will also capture more than three hundred and fifty material properties, compared with fewer than twenty-five properties in earlier AI-based materials databases.

The team has used the database to find alloys for lightweight, magnetic and corrosion-resistant materials. These materials can be used in the manufacturing of cars, aircraft, electric vehicles, marine structures and energy systems, the press note said.

The research was conducted by Aravindan Kamatchi Sundaram, Mohit Chakraborty, Sai Mani Kumar Devathi and B Pabitramohan Prusty under the guidance of Rohit Batra, faculty member at IIT Madras.

Sharing additional details on the research, Rohit Batra added, “The platform generated two comprehensive databases containing more than 185,000 structured records, making them the largest publicly available multicomponent alloy databases in the world. We also integrated sustainability indicators including environmental, economic and social parameters to identify advanced alloys that combine high performance with lower environmental impact.”