AI-driven lab finds iridium-free palladium catalyst InMnPdOx stable for 1,000 hours
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-09-26
Lila's new preprint (arXiv 2609.30133) reports an AI-guided closed-loop platform discovering iridium- and ruthenium-free palladium-oxide catalysts for acidic oxygen evolution.
- Platform is >90% automated, combining combinatorial sputter synthesis, high-throughput screening, ML composition-property models, adaptive multi-objective optimization, and LLM reasoning
- Synthesized and screened 2,942 compositions across 53 material systems and 26 elements
- Lead candidate InMnPdOx held <500 mV overpotential for 1,000 hours at 10 mA/cm² in 1 M H₂SO₄; unmodified PdOx crossed that threshold at 200 hours
- Counterintuitive: electrochemists wouldn't have prioritized palladium, but adding indium and manganese transformed activity and stability—a combination neither conventional design logic nor off-the-shelf LLMs predicted
- Industrial electrolyzer validation remains ahead
Blog write-up accompanies the paper.
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