Soaking up the sun with artificial intelligence

It will be doing so for billions more years. Yet, we have only just begun tapping into that abundant, renewable source of energy at affordable cost. Solar absorbers are a material used to convert this energy into heat or electricity. Maria Chan, a scientist in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, has developed a machine learning method for screening many thousands of compounds as solar absorbers. Her co-author on this project was Arun Mannodi-Kanakkithodi, a former Argonne postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Purdue University.