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Automated and High-Throughput Phase Separation Control for Supramolecular Polymer Blends Enabled by Machine Learning
- Wang, Yunfei;
- Struble, Daniel;
- Upreti, Saroj;
- Xie, Zongliang;
- Chan, Ka Hung;
- Liu, Yi;
- Zhu, Chenhui;
- Ashby, Paul;
- Xia, Wenjie;
- Patton, Derek;
- Ma, Boran;
- Gu, Xiaodan
Published Web Location
https://doi.org/10.1021/jacsau.6c00041Abstract
Supramolecular polymer blends (SPBs) offer tunable morphologies that dictate their macroscopic properties, yet their rational design is limited by the absence of predictive structure-morphology models. Here, we introduce a data-driven high-throughput workflow that integrates modular polymer synthesis, robotic formulation, automated morphology characterization, and machine learning (ML) for accelerated SPB discovery. Using a plug-and-play synthetic strategy, 33 hydrogen-bonding end-functional homopolymers were prepared and orthogonally combined to generate 260 SPBs in 1 day. A fully automated atomic force microscopy (AFM) pipeline enabled systematic imaging, producing 2340 morphology data sets with minimal human intervention. Domain spacings were extracted through complementary image-processing methods and used to train ML models. A support vector regression (SVR) model accurately predicted target phase-separation sizes (50, 100, and 150 nm), which were experimentally validated. This work demonstrates the power of coupling high-throughput experimentation with ML to accelerate morphology discovery and provides one of the first large-scale experimental data sets for supramolecular polymer systems.
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