This robot chemist took eight days to discover a new catalyst – a task that would’ve taken human researchers months to complete
When a team at the University of Liverpool set out to find a new chemical catalyst that could speed up the extraction of hydrogen from water – an area of research that has implications for green energy and other industries – they knew they were looking at a lot of work. Millions of possible experiments were to run in their search, so they wanted to find an alternative way of doing things. And what could be better than a robot chemist?
“Our motivation was to make what is a complex process autonomous,” explains Prof Andrew Cooper, who led the robot chemist’s development.
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