E-Mail IMAGE: Engineers at Rice University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using neural networks to accelerate the prediction of how microstructures of materials evolve. This example predicts snowflake-like dendritic crystal growth.... view more Credit: Mesoscale Materials Science Group/Rice University HOUSTON - (April 30, 2021) - The microscopic structures and properties of materials are intimately linked, and customizing them is a challenge. Rice University engineers are determined to simplify the process through machine learning. To that end, the Rice lab of materials scientist Ming Tang, in collaboration with physicist Fei Zhou at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, introduced a technique to predict the evolution of microstructures -- structural features between 10 nanometers and 100 microns -- in materials.