Automating and Accelerating Scientific Discovery – Continuous and Discontinuous Experimentation Setups for Polymer Research and High-Quality Dataset Generation

Abstract

Here, we present technologies applied at IBM Research to automate and accelerate materials discovery, especially in the domain of polymer chemistry. Automated continuous (flow reactors) and discontinuous experimentation setups (high-speed pipettors) allow for control, reproducibility, comprehensive data capturing, resource and time efficient experiment execution, and the creation of high quality data sets. In the second part, it is presented how building a project-focused data infrastructure is approached with custom software components. Thereby, we also elaborate on the current transition of science into Accelerated Discovery, its characteristics and a lab-of-the-future platform.