Facilities & Tools
The Pozzo research group utilizes state-of-the-art commercially available and lab-designed high-throughput experimentation and characterization tools. Explore some of these instruments below:
Equipped with both Copper (Cu) and Molybdenum sources, Xenocs Xeuss 3.0 allows high-throughput Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS) experimentation for solids, liquids, and gel-type samples. With the optional stages available, experimentation can be performed under high (350ºC) and low (-196ºC) temperatures, under humid and atmospheric environments, and with the application of tensile and shear forces. The Pozzo group manages the SAXS for MEM-C open for campus-wide usage at UW.
Opentrons-based liquid handling robots are our workhorse for high throughput synthesis. We have open-sourced our custom scripts to make samples, and design new hardware all written primarily in Python programming language to be compatible with the Opentrons python API. More details about this software can be found on the GitHub project. We also utlize Science Jubilee, a modular platform for material exploration, creation, and sonication thanks to its tool-changin capabilities. Check out the documentation and project repository.
PhasIR is an open-source thermal analysis tool built by the Pozzo research group to evaluate melting/boiling/phase transition temperatures in high-throughput manner. PhasIR utilizes an infrared thermal camera to take measurements with the accuracy of conventional DSC instruments, while having a total cost around $1000. More details on PhasIR can be found in this article
HARDy is a python package developed as part of capstone project for Data-Intensive Research on Clean Energy Technology (DIRECT) program. HARDy increases the data density of images through both numerical and RGB transformations to improve the classification of data in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). More details on HARDy can be accessed through this link
We have developed a set of tools based on the functional data analysis (FDA) framework to process high-throughput data collected from various sources (SAXS, spectroscopy) and have open-sourced relevant software on our GitHub page. We believe FDA-based autonomous workflows provide us greater leverage in encoding domain knowledge from scientists and experiments to build faithful and generalizable material acceleration platforms. Some of the applications of the FDA to high-throughput experiments can be found in [1], [2], [3].
In addition, the Pozzo Research Group utilizes shared facilities as members of collaborative institutes such as: the Molecular Analysis Facility (MAF), Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC)-funded Molecular Engineering Materials Center (MEM-C), Clean Energy Institute (CEI), Washington Clean Energy Testbeds (WCET), the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales (CSSAS), and the Research Training Testbeds (RTT).