Researchers in materials discovery have tested options through a mixture of hunches, informed speculation, and trial by error. It is a difficult and time consuming process due to the vast array of possible substances and combinations.
Venkat Viswanathan is a co-author of the Nature Communications paper and a founder and chief scientist at Aionics. The co-principal investigator on the project was JayWhitacre, director of the university's Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy innovation.
The promise of a system is that it can work through a wide range of possibilities and apply what it learns in a systematic way.
It doesn't bring much bias to its suggestions since it doesn't have information about chemistry or batteries. It runs through a wide variety of combinations, from mild refinements of the original to completely out of the box suggestions, homing in on a mix of ingredients that delivers better and better results against its programmed goal.
In the case of battery experiments, the Carnegie Mellon team was looking for an electrolyte that could speed up the time it took for batteries to charge. The solution helps shuttle ion and atom between the two batteries. During discharge, the anode in the solution is a negative one, and the solution goes towards the positive one. The process is reversed duringcharging.
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