Norck launches AI-powered material discovery, optimisation and manufacturing service

Norck, the on-demand engineering and manufacturing company, today launched AI-Powered Material Discovery, Optimisation and Manufacturing, a new service that helps companies find, prove and build with the materials their products need.

The service runs on MS Lattice, a proprietary AI-powered material discovery engine developed by MatterSpace. Under an agreement between the two companies, Norck has licensed MS Lattice and integrated it into its own engineering and manufacturing services. Customers work directly with Norck, which manages each project from the first requirement to final delivery.

For years, Norck has helped companies turn their designs into precision parts through CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, 3D printing and injection molding. The new service takes Norck one step earlier, to the material itself, and positions the company as an advanced engineering and R&D partner for organisations pushing the limits of what materials can do.

Two ways to move beyond material limits

Every engineering team eventually meets a limit set by the material itself: not strong enough, too heavy, unstable at temperature or not efficient enough. Norck's new service addresses that limit in two ways:

– Existing Material Optimisation. Not every project needs a brand-new material. Norck starts from the material a customer already uses and works to improve its performance and its fit to the technical requirements.

– Breakthrough Material Discovery. When today's materials aren't enough, Norck searches beyond them for new materials with new properties and potential.

The goal is solutions that can move an industry past its current technical limits.

Requirements first, preferences optimised

Every project starts by separating two things. Requirements are the technical constraints a material must meet, and the search is built to find candidates that satisfy them. Preferences are the properties a customer would like to improve as far as possible, and they are optimised on top of the requirements, never at their expense. The result is a search shaped around the customer's product, not a generic list of materials.

MS Lattice works through inverse design: it starts from the properties a customer needs and searches back to material structures that could deliver them, combining adaptive search, physics-based evaluation and structured validation.

From computation to the physical world

Norck's service doesn't stop at a promising result on a screen. Each project follows a process that connects computational discovery with real-world results:

– Define: the customer shares the properties, requirements and preferences that matter.

– Discover and optimise: using MS Lattice, Norck searches, designs and optimises material candidates computationally.

– Select: the strongest candidates are chosen against the requirements and target properties.

– Synthesise and validate: candidates are synthesised and tested for manufacturability, stability and expected properties.

– Evaluate and iterate: real-world results feed back into design; if a candidate falls short, the team refines and tries again.

– Produce the material: successful materials move into production with qualified manufacturing partners.

– Manufacture the part: where needed, the new material is turned into the customer's final part or product.

– Deliver: the customer receives a validated material solution, produced material or finished parts, depending on the agreed scope.

Material discovery is iterative by nature, and the service is built around that reality. Candidates are tested, results are evaluated and designs are refined until the material is ready for real-world use.

A scope that fits each project

Producing a new material and manufacturing a part from it are two different steps, and not every customer needs both. Customers can choose the scope that fits their programme:

– Discovery or optimisation only

– Discovery and physical validation

– Discovery, validation and material production

– End to end, from discovery to finished parts

For highly specialised materials and parts, Norck coordinates production with expert manufacturers that have the right capabilities, so every project gets the capability it needs.

Eleven material domains

The service covers eleven material domains, each with its own material groups, targets and starting points:

– Battery cathodes: cathodes for lithium-, sodium-, potassium- and magnesium-ion batteries, including layered NMC and NCA oxides, spinel oxides, polyanion frameworks and Prussian blue analogues.

– Solid electrolytes: ion conductors for solid-state batteries, fuel cells and electrolysers, including garnets, NASICON-type conductors, sulfides, halides, oxide-ion and proton conductors, and ceramic–polymer composites.

– Catalysis: catalysts for hydrogen, CO₂ conversion and cleaner chemistry, including single-atom alloys, alloy surfaces, oxide-supported catalysts, acid OER anodes, ORR alloys and CO₂ reduction surfaces.

– Magnets: permanent and soft magnets with less reliance on rare earths, from high-performance and reduced-rare-earth NdFeB to rare-earth-free MnAl, hexaferrites, iron–silicon, iron–cobalt and spinel ferrites.

– Photovoltaics: solar absorbers beyond silicon, including halide and double perovskites, chalcohalides and chalcogenide absorbers.

– Thermoelectrics: materials that turn heat into electricity, including chalcogenides, skutterudites, half-Heuslers and oxide thermoelectrics.

– High-entropy alloys: alloys of several principal elements, including transition-metal, corrosion-resistant, lightweight and refractory alloys.

– Superconductors: across the known families, including cuprates, iron-based pnictides, bilayer nickelates, MgB₂-type compounds and high-pressure hydrides.

– Thermal barrier coatings: coatings that shield parts at high temperature, including stabilised zirconia, rare-earth zirconates, high-entropy oxides and environmental barrier coatings.

– Hard coatings: wear-resistant coatings for tools and parts, including nitrides and carbides, diborides and MAX phases.

– Ultra-high-temperature ceramics: ceramics for the most extreme heat, including rock-salt carbides, diboride composites, high-entropy carbides and high-entropy diborides.

Designing polymers themselves is outside the current scope; for ceramic–polymer composites, the search focuses on the ceramic filler. When a customer's need doesn't fit any domain, Norck says so upfront, before a project begins.

Built for ambitious R&D programmes

The service is designed for organisations running large-scale R&D programmes and investing in advanced materials, with a focus on aerospace and aviation, space technologies, defence, automotive, energy, battery technologies, advanced manufacturing and high-tech engineering and research. Norck expects initial R&D and material development projects to grow into larger, long-term industrial programmes.

"Our customers come to us with demanding engineering problems, and more and more often the answer starts with the material itself," said Mucahit Basaran, ceo of Norck. "With MS Lattice integrated into our services, we can now help customers optimize the materials they already use or search for breakthrough materials, and then take the results into the physical world: validated, produced and built into their parts. We're not delivering a model on a screen. We're delivering outcomes."

Availability

The service is available now to customers in Europe and the United States. Organisations can learn more and start a material project at norck.com/pages/ai-powered-material-discovery-optimization-and-manufacturing. Projects can be conducted under NDA from the first conversation.