A.I./Robotic Lab research23 Jul 2021 10:17
"To break this logjam, Viswanathan built a “self-driving laboratory” called Otto. He then tasked it with optimizing stability for a recently discovered class of electrolytes in which salt is dissolved in water at very high concentrations—a system for which no good theory exists to guide experimentation. In just 40 hours, the AI-robot combination had iteratively explored a space of some 1.2 million combinations of four salts and improved on the best known “water-in-salt” electrolyte, the team reported late last year. The result generated by the robot is a combination that human scientists would probably never have thought of, Viswanathan says. “We still don’t know clearly why it works, which is the kind of answer we were looking for.”
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/100
This approach is likely to accelerate the search for the best battery chemistries.