A self-driving laboratory optimizes a scalable process for making functional coatings
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Functional coatings are used in a wide range of high surface-area technologies, such as low-E windows and photovoltaics. Solution-based coatings are typically less expensive to produce than vacuum-based coatings; however, it is generally more difficult to produce high-quality coatings using solution-based methods due to lower control over the physical and chemical processes involved. Here, we show how a self-driving laboratory can be used to optimize spray coating parameters. For this demonstration, we optimized the combustion synthesis of spray-cast conductive palladium (Pd) films. The closed-loop optimization yielded films with conductivities of >4 MS/m, which compares favorably with the conductivities of 2–6 MS/m reported for thin Pd films obtained by vacuum-based sputtering processes. The champion coating conditions were scaled up to an 8× larger area using the same spray-coating apparatus while preserving coating quality and conductivity. This work shows how self-driving laboratories can optimize solution-based coatings at scale.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it