Autonomous robotic platform (PolyBot) for conjugated polymer processing

In the past 40 years, conjugated polymers have been widely studied and used in many novel applications, such as printable electronics, wearable electronics, and flexible energy devices, because of their unique characteristics of (opto)electronic property, mechanical softness, and low-cost manufacturing. The high throughput production of conjugated polymer thin films at low temperatures is a critical processing step in the manufacturing of devices. However, the processing of these nanometers-thick layers generally occurs under strong deformations/stressors and rapid flows, conditions under which equilibrium thermodynamics does not apply, resulting in significant structural variabilities in ways that are hard to predict. As a result, it remains a big challenge to control the assembly of these conjugated polymers towards desired multi-scale morphological orderings, which critically impact their solid-state properties (e.g., electronic property, optical property, mechanical property, stability, etc.). This talk will introduce the utilization of the self-driving lab -PolyBot (https://www.anl.gov/cnm/polybot) for autonomously controlling the assembly of conjugated polymers towards targeted structures for desired electronic properties.