Is a robot coming for your job?

The design and discovery of porous materials have become a central theme in materials science, driven by their applications in gas storage, separation, carbon capture, and catalysis. Rapid advances in synthetic chemistry, particularly in metal–organic frameworks, porous organic cages, and conjugated microporous polymers, have enabled the generation of increasingly large and diverse material libraries.

Pharmaceuticals increasing complexity requires longer synthesis with unique processes for each step, increasing the number of experiments to develop robust sustainable processes. The time to develop these processes is getting shorter, and automation can support the growing need to efficiently perform more experiments.

Advances in high-throughput instrumentation and laboratory automation are revolutionizing materials synthesis by enabling the rapid generation of large libraries of novel materials.