DARPA taps Cambium for AI tools to identify biobased polymer composites

0
8

In California, materials innovator Cambium was awarded a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to build artificial intelligence capabilities for identifying novel “bio-enabled extreme-performance” polymer composites.

The project will use generative AI to overcome the long-standing trade-off between thermal stability and mechanical strength in structural composites. Cambium and DARPA seek to identify commercially viable ultra-lightweight polymers capable of replacing structural titanium in high-performance applications.

The project will address limitations that plagued past machine learning efforts, including the scarcity of specialized polymer data, by exploiting novel multimodal AI architectures. The resulting technologies and novel materials will accelerate Cambium’s existing AI-driven materials discovery and development platform to address defense needs and commercial markets in automotive, aerospace, and energy.