A team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has recently managed to automatically synthesize and optimize oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts from meteorites. Martians with their chemical robot equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), as published in the journal Nature Synthesis.
Now, hope is breaking through thanks to the recent discovery of aquatic activity on Mars. Scientists are exploring the possibility of breaking down water to produce oxygen with the help of OER catalysts. The challenge is to find a way to synthesize these catalysts in situ using materials from Mars, instead of transporting them from Earth, which is expensive.
To address this problem, a team led by professors LUO Yi, JIANG Jun and SHANG Weiwei, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has recently managed to automatically synthesize and optimize catalysts OER from Martian meteorites with its chemical robot equipped with artificial intelligence (AI).
"AI chemist innovatively synthesizes OER catalysts from Martian material through interdisciplinary cooperation," said Professor LUO Yi, lead scientist of the team.
In each experimental cycle, the AI chemist first analyzes the elemental composition of Martian minerals using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) as his eyes.
It then carries out a series of pretreatments of minerals, including weighing at the solid dispensing workstation, preparing raw material solutions at the liquid dispensing workstation, separating the liquid into the centrifugation workstation and the solidification in the drying workstation.
The resulting metal hydroxides are treated with Nafion adhesive to prepare the working electrode for OER testing at the electrochemical workstation. Test data is sent to the AI chemist's computational “brain” in real time for machine learning (ML) processing.
The AI chemist's "brain" employs quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations for 30,000 high-entropy hydroxides with different elemental ratios and calculates their OER catalytic activities using density functional theory. The simulation data are used to train a neural network model to rapidly predict the activities of catalysts with different elemental compositions.
Finally, using Bayesian optimization, the “brain” predicts the combination of available Martian minerals needed to synthesize the optimal OER catalyst.
So far, the AI chemist has created an excellent catalyst using five types of Martian meteorites under unmanned conditions. This catalyst can operate constantly for more than 550,000 seconds at a current density of 10 mA cm-2 and an overpotential of 445.1 mV. Additional testing at -37°C, the temperature of Mars, confirmed that the catalyst can consistently produce oxygen without any apparent degradation.
In two months, the AI chemist has completed the complex catalyst optimization that would take a human chemist 2,000 years.
The team is working to turn chemical AI into a general experimentation platform for various chemical syntheses without human intervention. The reviewer of the article indicates that "this type of research is of great interest and is developing rapidly in the synthesis and discovery of organic/inorganic materials." "In the future, humans will be able to establish an oxygen factory on Mars with the help of chemical AI," says JIANG. Only 15 hours of solar irradiation are needed to produce sufficient oxygen concentration for human survival. "This technological advance brings us one step closer to achieving our dream of living on Mars," he says.
