An artist's illustration of the machine learning process for nanomaterials discovery. Image: Northwestern University.Scientists and institutions dedicate more resources each year to the discovery of novel materials to fuel the world. As natural resources diminish and the demand for higher value and advanced performance products grows, researchers have increasingly looked to nanomaterials.
Nanoparticles have already found their way into applications ranging from energy storage and conversion to quantum computing and therapeutics. But given the vast compositional and structural tunability offered by nanochemistry, serial experimental approaches to identify new materials impose insurmountable limits on discovery.
Now, researchers at Northwestern University and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have successfully applied machine learning to guide the synthesis of new nanomaterials, eliminating barriers associated with materials discovery. Their highly trained algorithm combed through a defined dataset to accurately predict new structures that could fuel processes in the clean energy, chemical and automotive industries.
“We asked the model to tell us what mixtures of up to seven elements would make something that hasn’t been made before,” said Chad Mirkin, a Northwestern nanotechnology expert and the corresponding author of a paper on this work in Science Advances. “The machine predicted 19 possibilities, and, after testing each experimentally, we found 18 of the predictions were correct.”
Mirkin is a professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering, and materials science and engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, and a professor of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine. He also is the founding director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology.
According to Mirkin, what makes this so important is the access to unprecedentedly large, good quality datasets, because machine learning models and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can only be as good as the data used to train them.
The data-generation tool, called a 'Megalibrary', was invented by Mirkin and dramatically expands a researcher’s field of vision. Each Megalibrary houses millions or even billions of nanostructures, each with a slightly distinct shape, structure and composition, all positionally encoded on a 2cm-by-2cm chip. To date, each chip contains more new inorganic materials than have ever been collected and categorized by scientists.
Mirkin’s team developed the Megalibraries by using a technique (also invented by Mirkin) called polymer pen lithography, a massively parallel nanolithography tool that enables the site-specific deposition of hundreds of thousands of features each second.
When mapping the human genome, scientists were tasked with identifying combinations of four bases. But the loosely synonymous 'materials genome' includes nanoparticle combinations of any of the usable 118 elements in the periodic table, as well as parameters of shape, size, phase morphology, crystal structure and more. Building smaller subsets of nanoparticles in the form of Megalibraries will bring researchers closer to completing a full map of a materials genome.
According to Mirkin, even with something similar to a 'genome' of materials, identifying how to use or label them requires different tools. “Even if we can make materials faster than anybody on Earth, that’s still a droplet of water in the ocean of possibility,” he said. “We want to define and mine the materials genome, and the way we’re doing that is through artificial intelligence.”
Machine learning applications are ideally suited to tackle the complexity of defining and mining the materials genome, but are limited by the ability to create datasets to train algorithms in the space. Mirkin said the combination of Megalibraries with machine learning may finally eradicate that problem, leading to an understanding of what parameters drive certain materials properties.
If Megalibraries provide a map, machine learning provides the key. Using Megalibraries as a source of high-quality and large-scale materials data for training AI algorithms should allow researchers to move away from the 'keen chemical intuition' and serial experimentation that typically accompany the materials discovery process.
“Northwestern had the synthesis capabilities and the state-of-the-art characterization capabilities to determine the structures of the materials we generate,” Mirkin said. “We worked with TRI’s AI team to create data inputs for the AI algorithms that ultimately made these predictions about materials no chemist could predict.”
In the study, the team compiled previously generated Megalibrary structural data on nanoparticles with complex compositions, structures, sizes and morphologies. They used this data to train the model and asked it to predict compositions of four, five and six elements that would result in a certain structural feature. In 19 predictions, the machine learning model predicted new materials correctly 18 times — an approximately 95% accuracy rate.
With little knowledge of chemistry or physics, using only the training data, the model was able to accurately predict complicated structures that have never existed on Earth. “As these data suggest, the application of machine learning, combined with Megalibrary technology, may be the path to finally defining the materials genome,” said Joseph Montoya, senior research scientist at TRI.
Metal nanoparticles show promise for catalyzing industrially critical reactions such as hydrogen evolution, carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction, and oxygen reduction and evolution. The model was trained on a large Northwestern-built dataset to look for multi-metallic nanoparticles with set parameters around phase, size, dimension and other structural features that change the properties and function of nanoparticles.
The Megalibrary technology could also drive discoveries across many other areas critical to the future, including plastic upcycling, solar cells, superconductors and qubits.
Before the advent of megalibraries, machine learning tools were trained on incomplete datasets collected by different people at different times, limiting their predictive power and generalizability. Megalibraries allow machine learning tools to do what they do best – learn and get smarter over time. Mirkin said their model will only get better at predicting correct materials as it is fed more high-quality data collected under controlled conditions.
“Creating this AI capability is about being able to predict the materials required for any application,” Montoya said. “The more data we have, the greater predictive capability we have. When you begin to train AI, you start by localizing it on one dataset, and, as it learns, you keep adding more and more data – it’s like taking a kid and going from kindergarten to their PhD. The combined experience and knowledge ultimately dictates how far they can go.”
The team is now using the approach to find catalysts critical to fuelling processes in the clean energy, automotive and chemical industries. Identifying new green catalysts will allow the conversion of waste products and plentiful feedstocks to useful substances, hydrogen generation, CO2 utilization and the development of fuel cells. Such catalysts could also replace expensive and rare materials like iridium, the metal used to generate green hydrogen and CO2 reduction products.
This story is adapted from material from Northwestern University, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.