Publication date: 15th December 2025
Functional materials for next-generation energy devices such as batteries, fuel cells, electrolyzers are fabricated by powder film formation; mixture, disperse, apply, and dry. As with powdered dishes, nano- and micro-scale complex phenomena in each process. Process Informatics is one solution to the requirement of high-throughput exploration of process parameters. This talk introduces a topic of autonomous exploration of drying process, minimizing the defect ratio of catalyst layer of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The first prototype in Fig. (a) demonstrated the optimization of the drying parameter minimizing the defect ratio of carbon catalyst layer. The system reached the optimization with only 40 trial-and-error Bayesian optimization among 40,000 candidates [1]. The scalable process exploration method, ROPES (Robotic Objective Process Exploration System) in Fig. (b) integrated the process unit; the die-coating, the four-step zone-heating, and the evaluation unit; the camera, the interferometer, and the electronic conductivity testing. The second prototype realized the high-speed automatic experiments and high-throughput autonomous exploration of drying process, which also contributes the scaleup to factory-size zone-heating process.
Keywords：Process Informatics; powder film formation; autonomous exploration; Scaleup
K. Nagato acknowledges the support of JST-Mirai Program JPMJMI21G2, JST-Mirai Program JPMJMI19G3, and NEDO Project 23200629-0.
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