The Evolution of Materials Acceleration Platforms -- Towards the Laboratory of the Future with AMANDA

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of Materials Acceleration Platforms (MAPs) and introduces AMANDA, a versatile automation platform for materials research, demonstrating its application in organic solar cell development with high throughput and detailed characterization.

Contribution

It presents the AMANDA platform, a novel, flexible automation system for materials science, and showcases its application in high-throughput organic solar cell fabrication and testing.

Findings

AMANDA can produce and characterize up to 272 device variations per day.

The platform achieved 13.7% efficiency in organic solar cells processed in air.

AMANDA enables comprehensive documentation and characterization of each device.

Abstract

The development of complex functional materials poses a multi-objective optimization problem in a large multidimensional parameter space. Solving it requires reproducible, user independent laboratory work and intelligent preselection of experiments. However, experimental materials science is a field where manual routines are still predominant, although other domains like pharmacy or chemistry have long used robotics and automation. As the number of publications on Materials Acceleration Platforms (MAPs) increases steadily, we review selected systems and fit them into the stages of a general material development process to examine the evolution of MAPs. Subsequently we present our approach to laboratory automation in materials science. We introduce AMANDA (Autonomous Materials and Device Application Platform), a generic platform for distributed materials research comprising a self-developed software backbone and several MAPs. One of them, LineOne (L1), is specifically designed to produce and characterize solution processed thin-film devices like organic solar cells (OSC). It is designed to perform precise closed-loop screenings of up to 272 device variations per day yet allows further upscaling. Each individual solar cell is fully characterized and all process steps are comprehensively documented. We want to demonstrate the capabilities of AMANDA L1 with OSCs based on PM6:Y6 with 13.7% efficiency when processed in air. Further we discuss challenges and opportunities of highly automated research platforms and elaborate on the future integration of additional techniques, methods and algorithms in order to advance to fully autonomous self-optimizing systems - a paradigm shift in functional materials development leading to the laboratory of the future.