How would you explain your research to a 10-year-old?
Materials support the society we live in. During the Stone Age, we lived in caves, but in the Iron Age, we invented steel, which is superior to build with. So, developing new materials can have a huge impact on society.
But it’s also a very slow process, and I don’t want to wait thousands of years for us to find new materials that can change the world.
If we could accelerate that process, it would have a huge importance in combating climate change, for instance. And the way I accelerate it is by using robots and artificial intelligence to create self-driving labs.
How do you do that?
The robots are like our arms – they make the chemistry for us. And AI is the brain that understands the data and tells the robots what to do.
That means we no longer have to go to the lab and do experiments, but rather have the scientific knowledge and tell the self-driving laboratory what we want to achieve.
And then the AI steers the robots to do it for us.
What can those materials be used for?
When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, we get lots of energy from wind turbines and solar cells, so we want to turn that power into something else – for instance, methanol, which can fuel Mærsk’s container ships.
But to do so, you need catalysts that accelerate a chemical process on their surface.
So, we’re looking at nano materials that are very small and therefore have a huge surface relative to their mass. But they’re difficult to synthesize.
I try to create new nano catalysts that, for instance, can be used to create methanol.
What has surprised you the most while working in this field?
That it works!
We combine expertise from various fields, from synthesis to robotics, AI and synchrotrons and then need to come up with a compromise that works for all those areas.
When we combine all that, research that used to take years, if not decades, is now taking hours – that’s pretty wild.
What will the world look like in 10 years if you succeed with your research?
Then you may not have to go to the lab unless you need to change something in the setup of the self-driving lab.
In the end, maybe we can speed up the process and get new materials every few years instead of every 100 years.
