Issue 5, 2024

A multiobjective closed-loop approach towards autonomous discovery of electrocatalysts for nitrogen reduction

Abstract

Electrocatalyst discovery is an inherently multiobjective challenge that can benefit from closed-loop approaches towards acceleration. However, previous computational closed-loop efforts for electrocatalysis have often focused on a single objective to be optimized. Here, we propose a multiobjective closed-loop strategy driven by sequential learning (SL) that employs a product of normalized property metrics to score candidates. In each iteration, a candidate catalyst system is autonomously selected via the multiobjective score, as implemented in our AutoCat software, and evaluated using a high-throughput density functional theory (DFT) pipeline. As a demonstration, we apply this scheme towards a model problem of searching for single-atom alloy (SAA) electrocatalysts for nitrogen reduction, balancing three targets: activity, stability, and cost. We limit our search to dopants on close-packed surface facets of simple transition metals, resulting in a total of 441 SAA systems in our design space. We show that our proposed formulation of the multiobjective scoring system and the SL framework efficiently explore the SAA design space to find optimal candidates. We also propose a ranking scheme that quantifies the effectiveness of an identified candidate in balancing all the target objectives, taking into account the uncertainty in the preliminary evaluation method (DFT) itself. Based on this scheme, we identify a few top-performing SAA candidates—Zr1Cr, Hf1Cr, Ag1Re, Au1Re, and Ti1Fe—for further investigation.

Graphical abstract: A multiobjective closed-loop approach towards autonomous discovery of electrocatalysts for nitrogen reduction

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
11 Dec 2023
Accepted
24 Mar 2024
First published
02 Apr 2024
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Digital Discovery, 2024,3, 999-1010

A multiobjective closed-loop approach towards autonomous discovery of electrocatalysts for nitrogen reduction

L. Kavalsky, V. I. Hegde, B. Meredig and V. Viswanathan, Digital Discovery, 2024, 3, 999 DOI: 10.1039/D3DD00244F

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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