Developing and Validating a High-Throughput Robotic System for the Accelerated Development of Porous Membranes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated, high-throughput robotic system for fabricating and characterizing porous membranes via NIPS, enabling faster, more consistent experiments and facilitating data-driven membrane optimization.

Contribution

The study presents a novel modular robotic platform that automates membrane fabrication and characterization, improving throughput, reproducibility, and integration into self-driving laboratory workflows.

Findings

Reproduced expected effects of polymer concentration and humidity on membrane properties.

Demonstrated increased membrane stiffness and uniformity with higher polymer concentration.

Validated the system's capability for high-throughput, reproducible membrane fabrication.

Abstract

The development of porous polymeric membranes remains a labor-intensive process, often requiring extensive trial and error to identify optimal fabrication parameters. In this study, we present a fully automated platform for membrane fabrication and characterization via nonsolvent-induced phase separation (NIPS). The system integrates automated solution preparation, blade casting, controlled immersion, and compression testing, allowing precise control over fabrication parameters such as polymer concentration and ambient humidity. The modular design allows parallel processing and reproducible handling of samples, reducing experimental time and increasing consistency. Compression testing is introduced as a sensitive mechanical characterization method for estimating membrane stiffness and as a proxy to infer porosity and intra-sample uniformity through automated analysis of stress-strain curves. As a proof of concept to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system, NIPS was carried out with polysulfone, the green solvent PolarClean, and water as the polymer, solvent, and nonsolvent, respectively. Experiments conducted with the automated system reproduced expected effects of polymer concentration and ambient humidity on membrane properties, namely increased stiffness and uniformity with increasing polymer concentration and humidity variations in pore morphology and mechanical response. The developed automated platform supports high-throughput experimentation and is well-suited for integration into self-driving laboratory workflows, offering a scalable and reproducible foundation for data-driven optimization of porous polymeric membranes through NIPS.