Artistic illustration of the process: An automated deposition system places new material on top of a base material (purple beam, right), and the final sample created is analyzed and sent to an AI (green beam, brain, left), which tells the pulsed laser deposition machine what to do next (data cable, bottom). Credit: Chris Rouleau/ORNL, U.S. Department of Energy
Researchers are developing ways to accelerate discovery by combining automated experimentation, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Leveraging these techniques, a new tool developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated how AI can influence materials synthesis and run related experiments without human oversight.
This autonomous materials synthesis tool uses pulsed laser deposition (PLD) to deposit thin layers of a substance onto a base material. It then employs AI to analyze how the quality of the newly created material relates to the synthesis conditions, such as temperature, pressure, and energy released during the PLD process. The AI suggests a modified set of conditions that could improve quality and controls the PLD machine to run the next experiment.
“We built computer control of all the processes into the system and included some hardware innovations to allow AI to drive the experiment,” said study leader Sumner Harris of ORNL's Nanophase Materials Science Center. “Automation allows us to do our work 10 times faster and allows the AI to understand the huge parameter space with far fewer samples.”
Source: Scott Gibson, ORNL
