REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Chinese scientists have created a chemical robot supported by artificial intelligence (AI), which can extract oxygen from Martian water without human supervision.
Launch Live Science, Sunday (3/12/2023), synthesizing useful resources from local materials on Mars will be vital for human survival on the Red Planet. “Extracting oxygen from materials (in a process called the oxygen evolution reaction (OER)) is critical,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing the new AI chemist, published November 13, 2023 in the journal Nature.
To achieve this goal, the team builds robot mobile that automates the entire process of oxygen extraction from five Martian and Martian-like meteorite samples. They also tested the system in a simulated Martian surface environment.
Most importantly, the AI searches for the perfect formula to produce oxygen in any sample from nearly 4 million possible combinations. This took humans more than 2,000 years. “Our study provides a demonstration that these advanced AI chemists, without human intervention, can synthesize OER catalysts on Mars from local ores,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The first step in extracting oxygen involves sending meteor samples to the facility for analysis in a fully automated laboratory. After that, the robot carries out initial processing of the ore, namely removing dirt and unwanted materials.
Then, the robot uses the materials inside the meteor to create a catalyst (a process called catalytic synthesis) that is tested in electrochemical performance testing.
The types of catalyst that can be produced with available resources and work most efficiently to extract oxygen, can vary greatly, so selecting the right catalyst is an important step. This is where AI chemists come into play.
The computing module on the robot, dubbed the ‘computational brain’, combines machine learning algorithms with theoretical models to analyze experimental data obtained by the robot and massive simulation data.
As the robot works to gather information, it sends this experimental data to a cloud server, where the computational brain uses machine learning to run tens of thousands of simulations, to predict the best way to produce oxygen.
This data is fed into a neural network model, which is quickly retrained and optimized with new experimental data from the robot. This algorithm identifies the best combination of materials to synthesize the best OER catalyst, verified by AI chemists.
Then, the robot drips optimized ‘catalyst ink’ on the meteor which is used in conjunction with electrodes, to produce oxygen. “This system can also be used to make many other chemicals and compounds,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
2023-12-03 05:41:45
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