Accelerated robotic discovery of type II porous liquids

Abstract

High-throughput automation was used to streamline the synthesis, characterisation, and solubility testing, of new Type II porous liquids, accelerating their discovery.

Unraveling the mechanism of CO2 capture and separation by porous liquids

“…However, the difficulty of preparation greatly limits the development of porous liquids, resulting in a few related reports, [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] many of which are more about porous organic cages. 25 Jie et al 15 successfully developed a porous liquid based on an anionic organic covalent cage and crown ether through a supramolecular complexation strategy.…”

High‐Throughput Approaches for the Discovery of Supramolecular Organic Cages

“…In the past few years, there has been emerging interest in the development of high-throughput computation-only [12] and synthesis-only [13] workflows targeting the discovery of materials with particular applications. For example, these methods have been successfully applied to organic, [14][15][16][17][18][19] hybrid, [20][21][22][23] and inorganic materials, [24] ranging from discrete molecules [17,18] to polymers, [14,15] frameworks, [20][21][22][23] and liquids, [16] and includes targeted screening of their solubility, [16] mechanical properties, [14] porosity, [20,[22][23][24] optical band gaps, [19] and their potential to form host-guest complexes. [17] However, while there is this handful of studies on the high-throughput synthesis of materials such as metal-organic frameworks, zeolites, and organic polymers, the use of robotic synthesis for supramolecular self-sorted organic materials and assemblies is rare, which is partly due to the difficulties in predicting the product outcome and the difficulty raised in characterising libraries of supramolecules.…”

“…This includes the use of flow reactors, [68] microwaves, [69] mechanochemistry including ball-milling [70] and twin-screw extrusion, [71] and automated robotic platforms. [16,39,47,72] The latter, in particular, is useful for high-throughput screening, with the former methods suitable for scale-up.…”

“…For example, Cooper and co-workers demonstrated how robotic crystallisation screens can be carried out, [46] and how the gas uptake ability of solid porous materials can be rapidly screened by monitoring the temperature change on exposing the samples to different gases after being evacuated under vacuum. [74] Alternatively, the workflow can be expanded for the discovery of new porous liquids by investigating the solubility of organic cages in cavityexcluded solvents, [16] and screening any highly soluble combinations for porosity. This greatly expanded the number of known porous liquids, and enabled the structure-property relationships that affect key parameters, such as gas uptake and viscosity, to be investigated for the first time.…”

An Autonomous Chemical Robot Discovers the Rules of Inorganic Coordination Chemistry without Prior Knowledge

“…However, expanding the scope of possibilities can result in an exponential increase in the number of possible experiments, along with a high cost in terms of time and resources. It is possible to use automation and suitable exploration algorithms to overcome these shortcomings . A key question in terms of chemistry is how to efficiently synthesise a wide range of ligands and complexes, and then how to explore and understand the self‐assembly process .…”