Abstract This supporting white paper addresses the design of material systems capable of maintaining functional integrity under extreme thermomechanical and chemically aggressive conditions typical of deep energy extraction, geothermal systems, and high-load drilling environments. The central thesis is that material stability in such regimes cannot be reduced to chemical composition alone. Instead, it must be understood as an emergent property of structural architecture, including bond geometry, defect topology, anisotropic transport pathways, and interfacial organization across multiple scales. We formulate material design as a constrained optimization problem in which the objective is to minimize an effective degradation functional subject to mechanical, thermal, tribological, and chemical constraints. Within this framework, anisotropic 2D and quasi-2D layered heterostructures—such as nitrides, carbides, and transition metal dichalcogenides—are identified as particularly promising due to their ability to decouple and control in-plane and out-of-plane transport, interfacial shear behavior, and defect propagation. The paper proposes physically grounded architectural classes and outlines experimentally verifiable criteria for evaluating performance improvements. The goal is not to claim a finalized material solution, but to define a coherent and testable engineering strategy for stability-oriented material design in extreme environments.
Roman Lukin (Thu,) studied this question.