Concept Note on AMPERE - Autonomous Manufacturing Platform for energy research and engineering
Principal Investigator
Prof. Abhinav Raman
Objective
- Imagine a world where all you have to do is provide a single prompt to end up with a fully functional energy conversion and storage device delivered in record time and at competitive costs. We aim to make this a reality by combining the disruptive power of artificial intelligence (AI) with contemporary experimental protocols and the principles of chemical process engineering to develop India's first autonomous precision materials upscaling and manufacturing lab for electrolyzers and batteries.
Description
- Our approach is unique and markedly different from autonomous labs worldwide, where there is a singular focus on materials discovery without any systems-level contextualization of developing an economically viable process for scale-up., We aim to design a modular autonomous lab that can perform closed-loop materials processing and characterization, component fabrication, component assembly, and device testing. This will be enabled by the development of a central AI agent that controls data management, experiment planning, and hardware actuation.
Impact
- This philosophy will also be used to build a standalone generative AI-based materials discovery platform, where combined performance metrics from in-silico materials properties, experimental evaluation, techno-economic feasibility, and life cycle assessment will be considered to facilitate multi-metric evaluation of materials at the discovery stage itself. We envision the integration of the two, supported by advanced orchestration, to result in a fully autonomous lab that can deliver precision devices, not just precision materials.