Autonomous Small-Angle Scattering for Accelerated Soft Material Formulation Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Martin, Tyler B., Sutherland, Duncan R., McDannald, Austin, Kusne, A. Gilad, Beaucage, Peter A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916808442773504
author Martin, Tyler B.
Sutherland, Duncan R.
McDannald, Austin
Kusne, A. Gilad
Beaucage, Peter A.
author_facet Martin, Tyler B.
Sutherland, Duncan R.
McDannald, Austin
Kusne, A. Gilad
Beaucage, Peter A.
contents The pace of soft material formulation (re)development and design is rapidly increasing as both consumers and new legislation demand products that do less harm to the environment while maintaining high standards of performance. To meet this need, we have developed the Autonomous Formulation Lab (AFL), a platform that can automatically prepare and measure the microstructure of liquid formulations using small-angle neutron and X-ray scattering and, soon, a variety of other techniques. Here, we describe the design, philosophy, tuning, and validation of our active learning agent that guides the course of AFL experiments. We show how our extensive in silico tuning results in an efficient agent that is robust to both the number of measurements and signal to noise variation. Finally, we experimentally validate our virtually tuned agent by addressing a model formulation problem: replacing a petroleum-derived component with a natural analog. We show that the agent efficiently maps both formulations and how post hoc analysis of the measured data reveals the opportunity for further specialization of the agent. With the tuned and proven active learning agent, our autonomously guided AFL platform will accelerate the pace of discovery of liquid formulations and help speed us towards a greener future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Autonomous Small-Angle Scattering for Accelerated Soft Material Formulation Optimization
Martin, Tyler B.
Sutherland, Duncan R.
McDannald, Austin
Kusne, A. Gilad
Beaucage, Peter A.
Soft Condensed Matter
Computational Physics
The pace of soft material formulation (re)development and design is rapidly increasing as both consumers and new legislation demand products that do less harm to the environment while maintaining high standards of performance. To meet this need, we have developed the Autonomous Formulation Lab (AFL), a platform that can automatically prepare and measure the microstructure of liquid formulations using small-angle neutron and X-ray scattering and, soon, a variety of other techniques. Here, we describe the design, philosophy, tuning, and validation of our active learning agent that guides the course of AFL experiments. We show how our extensive in silico tuning results in an efficient agent that is robust to both the number of measurements and signal to noise variation. Finally, we experimentally validate our virtually tuned agent by addressing a model formulation problem: replacing a petroleum-derived component with a natural analog. We show that the agent efficiently maps both formulations and how post hoc analysis of the measured data reveals the opportunity for further specialization of the agent. With the tuned and proven active learning agent, our autonomously guided AFL platform will accelerate the pace of discovery of liquid formulations and help speed us towards a greener future.
title Autonomous Small-Angle Scattering for Accelerated Soft Material Formulation Optimization
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11859