Center for Advanced Materials

The Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence is committed to primary and translational research in next-generation materials for addressing critical societal issues and technological challenges. The center aims to decipher pressing global issues and find solutions through innovations and transformative research in material science and technology, typically in the following key areas:

  • Bioinspired Materials for Healthcare, Drug-delivery, and Bio-sensing
  • Smart Structural Materials for Energy Harvesting and Storage
  • High-Strength Materials for Load-Bearing Applications and 
  • Functional Materials and Structures for Advanced Optoelectronics

CAM involves people with different core competencies and complementary skills to address highly diversified research domains, broadly classified into Advanced Structural and Functional Materials (ASFM) and Computational Design and Machine Learning (CDML). Both these research groups work together to explore the structure-property correlations using theoretical and experimental approaches.

The ASFM group looks into synthesis and applications of advanced materials such as high entropy alloys, ceramic oxides and nitrides, protective coatings, transparent conducting layers, low-dimensional materials, memory alloys, biomaterials, wide band-gap semiconductors, polymers and materials for optoelectronic, magnetic, ferro-electric, piezo-electric, energy storage, and harvesting.

The CDML group utilizes state-of-the-art computational facilities at CAM for ab-initio calculations and molecular dynamics to design novel materials. The computed structural descriptors, imaging data, and process parameters serve as input to a machine-learning model, trained to predict the value of the desired experimental quantity on materials yet to be synthesized.

Thrust Research Areas

Advanced Structural and Functional Materials

Structural Applications:

  • Refractory High Entropy Alloys and Superalloys for high-temperature applications
  • Complex Concentrated Alloys
  • High Strength Materials (Stainless Steel, Ultra-fine Grained Materials, Bulk Metallic Glasses) and
  • Degradation Resilient Materials – Erosion, Corrosion, and Wear

Functional Applications:

  • Self-Cleaning Surfaces
  • Energy Storage and Harvesting
  • Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors
  • Opto-electronic, Ferro- and Piezo-electric Materials
  • Protective Coatings
  • Transparent Conducting Layers
  • Magnetic Materials
  • Biomaterials
  • Molecular Sensing
  • New-generation Memory and
  • Novel Interfaces

Computational Design and Machine Learning

  • Emerging Inorganic, Organic, and Hybrid Materials
  • Low-dimensional Materials and Interfaces
  • Cheminformatics
  • Computational Quantum Chemistry
  • Materials Informatics and
  • Machine Learning