Studying-Polymers-On a-Chip (SPOC): High-throughput screening of polymers for battery applications

Automated high-throughput screening is accelerating and changing the way we discover and design the world around us. High-throughput screening, in which robotic liquid and solid handling systems investigate chemical and material combinations, is critical to the next big leap in scientific advancement. Because high viscosity materials are difficult for liquid-handling screening systems, researchers in fields like polymer and composite chemistry still need to synthesize, mix, cast, and characterize formulations by hand, bottlenecking advancement. We created an automated high-throughput screening system that can mix, deposit, process, and measure polymer and composite formulations on-machine and in real-time, called Studying-Polymers-on-a-Chip (SPOC). To demonstrate SPOC’s potential, we screened over 224 solid polymer electrolyte formulations, 868 discrete samples, for lithium- and sodium-ion batteries, measuring ionic conductivity via an electrochemical impedance substrate array. We validated SPOC’s ability to reduce time and labor by comparing trends in ionic conductivities measured between our SPOC substrate and traditional coin cell testing. SPOC produced over 3.1 times more unique samples and over 3.7 times more measurements than we accomplished through coin cell testing. Ultimately, the automated and autonomous screening capabilities of SPOC project an increase of over six times the number of samples per year in one tenth the effort it would take scientists to do by hand, with Bayesian optimization approaches showing potential for even further acceleration. As such, SPOC offers a significant advancement in the ability to quickly and effectively identify materials and properties critical for the next generation of scientific applications.