Welcome to AMD4Energy

AMD4Energy stands for Accelerated Materials Discovery for Energy Applications, and is a project supported by the KIT Excellence Initiative. We are building new approaches to the rational design of advanced materials for conversion of carbon dioxide into useful molecules.

The project is a joint collaboration between the Institute for Micro Process Engineering (IMVT) and the Institute for Biological and Chemical Systems - Functional Molecular Systems (IBCS-FMS), and involves several partners from other KIT institutes who will be involved as the project grows and expands.

The image below highlights how the project sits within a broader context of materials and information as they related to materials discovery and development. As the demand for new materials becomes even more urgent, to solve pressing energy and environmental problems, the importance of having a seamless connection between physical materials (like chemical precurors, catalyst samples, reactants and products in carbon dioxide conversion) and information or data (like the properties of the reactants, characterization of catalysts, and performance outcomes from reactions) is extremely apparent.

A key enabling technology to accelerate materials discovery is the use of robotics for materials handling, synthesis and characterisation steps. There are two clear benefits in doing this, firstly robotic systems, properly designed and implemented, can operate continuously and safely, providing much greater opportunity to explore a large number of potential materials compared to conducting all steps with human operators. Secondly, we can achieve very high levels of reproducibility and precision using robotics, which helps us to produce datasets that are very reliable. This is a critical outcome from this stage of the project, since in the next stage we will partner with Machine Learning experts to close the design -> synthesis -> characterization -> performance testing loop, aiming eventually for machine-directed synthesis.