A chemist played by artificial intelligence successfully created a catalyst that can produce oxygen from Martian meteorites. Colonizing and living on Mars is often the subject of science fiction. Before these dreams can become a reality, humanity faces huge challenges, such as the scarcity of vital resources like oxygen needed for long-term survival on the Red Planet. However, the recent discovery of water activity on Mars offers new hope for overcoming these obstacles.
Scientists are currently exploring the possibility of splitting water to produce oxygen through solar-powered electrochemical water oxidation with the help of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. The challenge now is to find a way to synthesize these catalysts in situ using materials on Mars, rather than transporting them from Earth, where shipping would be expensive.
Advances in artificial intelligence and Martian chemistry
To solve this problem, a team led by Professors Luo Yi, Professor Jiang Jun, and Professor Shang Weiwei from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently used their robotic artificial intelligence (AI) chemist to automatically synthesize and optimize OER catalysts from Martian meteorites.
Their research, conducted in collaboration with the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, was recently published in the journal Nature Synthesis. Professor Luo Yi, the team's chief scientist, said: "On the basis of interdisciplinary cooperation, artificial intelligence chemists innovatively synthesized OER catalysts using Martian materials."
In each experimental cycle, artificial intelligence chemists first use laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) as the "eye" to analyze the elemental composition of Martian ores. Then, it undergoes a series of pretreatments on the ore, including weighing in the solid distribution workstation, preparing raw material solutions in the liquid distribution workstation, separating from the liquid in the centrifugal separation workstation, and solidifying in the dryer workstation.
The resulting metal hydroxide was treated with DuPont Nafion binder to prepare the working electrode for OER testing at the electrochemical workstation. The test data is sent in real time to the AI chemist’s computational “brain” for machine learning (ML) processing.
The "brain" of the artificial intelligence chemist used quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics to simulate 30,000 high-entropy hydroxides with different element ratios, and calculated their OER catalytic activity through density functional theory. Simulated data are used to train neural network models to quickly predict catalyst activity for different elemental compositions.
Finally, through Bayesian optimization, the "brain" predicts the combination of available Martian ores needed to synthesize the optimal OER catalyst.
A breakthrough in oxygen production
So far, artificial intelligence chemists have created an excellent catalyst using five Martian meteorites under unattended conditions. At a current density of 10mAcm-2 and an overpotential of 445.1mV, this catalyst can operate stably for more than 550,000 seconds. Further tests at Martian temperatures of minus 37°C confirmed that the catalyst could stably produce oxygen without any significant degradation.
In two months, AI chemists completed complex catalyst optimization work that would have taken human chemists 2,000 years to complete.
The team is working to turn the AI chemist into a universal experimental platform that can perform a variety of chemical synthesis without human intervention. The reviewers of the paper spoke highly of it: "This type of research has broad significance and is in a rapid development stage in the field of organic/inorganic material synthesis and discovery."
"In the future, humans can build an oxygen factory on Mars with the assistance of artificial intelligence chemists," Jiang said. It only takes 15 hours of sunlight to produce a sufficient concentration of oxygen for human survival. "This breakthrough technology brings us one step closer to realizing our dream of living on Mars," he said.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily