A multi-disciplinary research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a groundbreaking new automated platform. Through this pioneering technology, we hope to significantly accelerate the discovery of new high-performing polymer material blends. This breakthrough technology allows today’s chemists to create and test 700 new polymer blends every single day. All with limited human intervention, it drastically increases the rate at which new materials can be researched and developed. Those fascinating discoveries were described in a recent study published in the journal Matter.
Connor Coley, the Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT departments of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, led the effort. He worked particularly intensively with Guangqi Wu, the first author and a former postdoc at MIT. The study was co-authored by Tianyi Jin, an MIT PhD student. The study is accessible on ChemRxiv with the DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-nh0xn.
The Automated Platform
The newly developed platform utilizes a powerful algorithm. It identifies high-performing polymer blends autonomously by mixing and testing combinations of polymers. The versatile system then rapidly delivers up to 96 polymer blends simultaneously to the autonomous robotic system. This automated robot then expertly curates the blends and measures the physical properties. As Coley explained, with this technology the discovery process becomes so much more efficient.
“Having that large of a design space necessitates algorithmic solutions and higher-throughput workflows because you simply couldn’t test all the combinations using brute force.” – Connor Coley
The automated system reduces operating labor by requiring human intervention only to refill and replace chemicals. That lets researchers focus their efforts on making sense of outcomes instead of getting mired in time-consuming tasks. This major decrease in manual labor allows us to focus on increasing productivity and rapidly developing new materials.
Efficient Material Blending
The Purdue University research team found that it is possible to achieve better performance by mixing often commercially available polymers together than by using a single polymer. The top overall mix was determined to have an impressive REA score of 73% REA. This outcome represents a remarkable 18% improvement over each individual element alone.
Wu emphasized the implications of these findings, stating, “This indicates that, instead of developing new polymers, we could sometimes blend existing polymers to design new materials that perform even better than individual polymers do.”
That said, Wu emphasized that the team had to pivot their strategy to maximize impact and results. To keep research and discovery manageable, they set a max cap of 5 polymers total in each blend.
“This algorithm is not new, but we had to modify the algorithm to fit into our system. For instance, we had to limit the number of polymers that could be in one material to make discovery more efficient.” – Guangqi Wu
The Future of Polymer Research
The novel path pursued by this collaborative research team represents a truly exciting leap forward in materials research. What’s unique about them is how they have used automation and smart whiz-bang algorithms to build that platform. This crosscutting platform will fundamentally accelerate the discovery and development of polymer materials.
Coley expressed the need to validate the information that these autonomous systems generate. He stated, “In autonomous discovery platforms, we emphasize algorithmic innovations, but there are many detailed and subtle aspects of the procedure you have to validate before you can trust the information coming out of it.”
The successful implementation of this automated platform opens doors for further exploration in polymer science, providing researchers with a powerful tool to innovate and refine materials for various applications.