High-throughput experimentation
Accelerating materials discovery via high-throughput experimentation
The development of advanced materials is a major driving force behind technological innovation and plays a critical role in addressing global societal challenges. Breakthroughs in materials science are needed to combat climate change by enabling cleaner batteries, more efficient carbon capture, and better catalysts to convert carbon back into fuels, chemicals, and other value-added products. More often than not, the challenge extends beyond identifying individual materials to finding combinations of materials that interact synergistically.
Our lab develops automated high-throughput materials research platforms that allow rapid screening of materials combinations in application-relevant environment. Specifically, our lab developed the automated robotic battery materials research platform Aurora (a), which integrates electrolyte formulation, battery cell assembly, and battery cell cycling into an automated workflow [1]. With more than 1500 battery cycling channels reserved for the Aurora platform, a huge amount of data is produced (b), which is structured in alignment with community standards, enriched with semantic annotations (c), and supported by full provenance tracking, thereby setting new standards in terms of ontologized, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data according to the FAIR data principles [2-4].
Our lab also developed the high-throughput electrocatalysis platform Ophelia consisting of 8 parallel electrochemical reactors with online gas and liquid product analysis by chromatography, tracking of flow rates, flow pressures, temperature, cell resistance, and electrode surface areas, providing unprecedented insights into CO2 electrolysis [5].
We believe in open science to make scientific research more transparent, accessible, and collaborative. Instrument automation and data management software packages developed in our lab are available openly and freely from our Github software repository [6]. An increasing number of data sets from the Aurora and Ophelia platform are available openly and freely from our Zenodo data repository. [7]
Selected publications
[1] E. Svaluto-Ferro, G. Kimbell, Y. Kim, N. Plainpan, B. Kunz, L. Scholz, R. Läubli, M. Becker, D. Reber, R.-S. Kühnel, P. Kraus, C. Battaglia, Toward an autonomous robotic battery materials research platform powered by automated workflow and ontologized findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data management, Batteries & Supercaps 202500155, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/batt.202500155
[2] P. Kraus, E. Bainglass, F. F. Ramirez, E. Svaluto-Ferro, L. Ercole, B. Kunz, S. P. Huber, N. Plainpan. N. Marzari, C. Battaglia, G. Pizzi, A bridge between trust and control: Computational workflows meet automated battery cycling, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2024, 12, 10773, https://doi.org/10.1039/D3TA06889G
[3] N. Plainpan, S. Clark, C. Battaglia, BattINFO converter: an automated tool for semantic annotation of battery cell metadata, Batteries & Supercaps, 2025, 202500151, https://doi.org/10.1002/batt.202500151
[4] S. Clark, C. Battaglia, Ivano E. Castelli, Eibar Flores, Lukas Gold, Christian Punckt, Simon Stier, Philipp Veit, Semantic resources for managing knowledge in battery research, ChemSusChem, 2025, 18, 202500458, https://doi.org/10.1002/cssc.202500458
[5] A. Senocrate, F. Bernasconi, P. Kraus, N. Plainpan, J. Trafkowski, F. Tolle, T. Weber, U. Sauter, and C. Battaglia, Parallel experiments in electrochemical CO2 reduction enabled by standardized analytics, Nature Catalysis, 2024, 7, 742, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-024-01172-x
[6] https://github.com/EmpaEconversion/
[7] https://zenodo.org/communities/empa_econversion/
Funding
ETH Board (PREMISE), Swiss National Science Foundation (NCCR Catalysis), Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe (Battery2030+)
Meet Aurora, the battery robot, Accelerating battery research with robots, https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/aurora-battery-robot
Boost for international battery research, Empa robot delivers largest open dataset for battery research, https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/aurora-battery-robot-open-source-data-format
Synthetic fuels and chemicals from CO₂, ten experiments in parallel, https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/parallel-co2-electrolysis