New Approach to Materials Synthesis—with Quick Validation by a Robotic Lab
Inorganic precursors chosen based on new criteria led to higher phase purity for 32 out of 35 target materials synthesized in a robotic laboratory.
The Science
One of the ways industry makes inorganic materials is by mixing raw materials called precursor powders and placing them in an oven to start a reaction. The end products can include everything from battery cathodes to catalysts. The results are often a mix of different compositions and structures, especially when the materials contain many elements. Researchers have proposed a new way of selecting precursors to increase the yield of a desired material. The researchers validated their new approach by synthesizing 35 target materials in 224 separate reactions. Such an undertaking would typically take months or years, but the team instead used the Samsung ASTRAL robotic lab to complete the task in a few weeks. The new recipe selection process obtained higher purity products for 32 of the 35 target materials.
The Impact
The materials discovery and synthesis process is often a bottleneck for new technologies. Researchers now have a new method to select the best precursors to produce desired products with high purities. This approach can reduce bottlenecks during the manufacture of known materials. It may also help synthesize materials that computer simulations predict will have improved performance. Combining this new precursor selection process with robotic synthesis can greatly speed the discovery of novel materials.
Summary
The synthesis of materials with many elements typically starts with multiple precursors that are mixed and reacted at high temperatures in an oven. However, the reactions often produce impurity phases along with the targeted phase. Avoiding these impurity phases has been a challenge because scientists do not fully understand synthetic pathways and processes. Now, researchers have discovered that reactions between pairs of precursors dominate the synthesis process. By carefully studying phase diagrams that relate all the potential precursor reactions and considering pairwise reactions only, the researchers have developed a new set of criteria for choosing precursors to avoid unwanted reactions.
To test their new approach to precursor selection, the researchers selected a large set of 224 reactions spanning 27 elements with 28 unique precursors targeting production of 35 oxide materials. The study used a robotic inorganic materials synthesis laboratory to accelerate the rate at which these experiments could be performed. For 32 of the 35 materials, reactions of precursors selected with the new criteria produced a higher yield of the targeted phase than the traditional precursors. This new approach to precursor selection can be a powerful tool to guide both human researchers and robotic laboratories, accelerating materials discovery.
Contact
Wenhao Sun
University of Michigan
[email protected]
Yan (Eric) Wang
Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology
[email protected]
Funding
This work was supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences program.
Publications
Chen, J., et al., Navigating phase diagram complexity to guide robotic inorganic materials synthesis. Nature Synthesis 3, 606 (2024). [DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00502-y]
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