Accelerated automated screening of viscous graphene suspensions with various surfactants for optimal electrical conductivity

TL;DR

This study introduces an automated method using robotics and computer vision to rapidly screen viscous graphene suspensions with various surfactants, identifying optimal formulations for electrical conductivity in under 18 hours.

Contribution

We developed a fully automated screening platform combining robotic pipetting, motorized measurement, and computer vision to efficiently evaluate graphene suspensions.

Findings

PVP surfactant yielded the highest electrical conductivity at 10.4 mS/cm.

Automation reduced experimental time to less than 18 hours with minimal human involvement.

The platform enables rapid, high-throughput screening of composite materials.

Abstract

Functional composite thin films have a wide variety of applications in flexible and/or electronic devices, telecommunications and multifunctional emerging coatings. Rapid screening of their properties is a challenging task, especially with multiple components defining the targeted properties. In this work we present a manifold for accelerated automated screening of viscous graphene suspensions for optimal electrical conductivity. Using Opentrons OT2 robotic auto-pipettor, we tested 3 most industrially significant surfactants - PVP, SDS and T80 - by fabricating 288 samples of graphene suspensions in aqueous hydroxypropylmethylcellulose. Enabled by our custom motorized 4-point probe measurement setup and computer vision algorithms, we then measured electrical conductivity of every sample using custom and identified that the highest performance is achieved for PVP-based samples, peaking at 10.4 mS/cm. The automation of the experimental procedure allowed us to perform majority of the experiments using robots, while involvement of human researcher was kept to minimum. Overall the experiment was completed in less than 18 hours, only 3 of which involved humans.