He had asked her to refine a key material in solar cells to boost its electrical conductivity. But the
number of potential tweaks was overwhelming, from spiking the recipe with
traces of metals and other additives to varying the heating and drying times.
"There are so many things you can go change, you can quickly go through 10
million [designs] you can test," Berlinguette says.
So he and colleagues outsourced the effort to a single-armed robot overseen by an artificial intelligence (AI)
algorithm. Dubbed Ada, the robot
mixed different solutions, cast them in films, performed heat treatments and
other processing steps, tested the films' conductivity, evaluated their microstructure, and logged the
results. The AI interpreted each
experiment and determined what to synthesize next. At a meeting of the
Materials Research Society (MRS) here last week, Berlinguette reported that the
system quickly homed in on a recipe and heating conditions that created
defect-free films ideal for solar cells. "What used to take us 9 months
now takes us 5 days," Berlinguette says.
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