NSEF Young Investigator Award - Research Acceleration in Nanoscience By Self-Driving Fluidic Labs

Despite the intriguing physicochemical properties and widespread applications of colloidal nanomaterials in energy and chemical technologies, their discovery, synthesis, and manufacturing are still based on Edisonian techniques. Existing nanomaterials development strategies using batch reactors with irreproducible and uncontrollable heat/mass transport rates very often fail to comprehensively explore the vast synthesis and processing universe of colloidal nanomaterials. Such resource-intensive experimental approaches result in a slow and expensive discovery and development of advanced functional nanomaterials (>10 years). Recent advances in reaction miniaturization and machine learning (ML)-assisted experimental space exploration techniques provide an exciting opportunity to reshape the discovery and manufacturing of colloidal nanomaterials and significantly accelerate the time-to-solution (from >10 years to <1 month). In this talk, I will present a 'self-driving fluidic lab (SDFL)' for autonomous discovery and manufacturing of emerging functional nanomaterials, with multi-step chemistries, through integration of flow chemistry, colloidal nanoscience, in-situ characterization, and ML. I will discuss how modularization of different nanomaterial synthesis and processing stages in tandem with a constantly evolving ML modeling and decision-making under uncertainty can enable a resource-efficient navigation through high dimensional experimental design spaces (>10²⁰ possible experimental conditions). Example applications of SDFL for the accelerated development of clean energy nanomaterials will be presented to illustrate the potential of autonomous robotic experimentation in reducing synthetic route discovery timeframe by 100x compared to conventional techniques. Finally, I will present the unique reconfigurability aspect of SDFLs to close the scale gap in colloidal nanoscience through facile switching from parameter space exploration/exploitation to smart nanomanufacturing.