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JULY 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 33 T H E C H E M I CA L C O N N ECT I O N And our smaller etchers allow us to test non-traditional processes that come to our attention and lead to sales in unex- pected areas. This is a sales tool that has produced results over the years. For all its faults (spoken from the per- spective of an old dinosaur born in the late 1940s), it is essential to have an excellent website. I'm no expert on websites, as you may have gathered, but it has provided many leads we may have otherwise been unaware of, such as etching glass display screens to remove microscopic cracks and scratches from the surface. Inquiries go to the technical sales manager for that terri- tory, who decides whether to contact the potential customer directly or alert the area sales rep for a visit. Once we send out a quote, the TSM reviews and makes any changes requested by the customer, and, after receiving a purchase order, shepherds the quote through engineering and engi- neering review with the customer. Once we manufacture the system modules, we assemble the system, wire it, and run it with water on the factory floor test area. The TSM then schedules a Factory Accep- tance Test site visit with the customer to confirm the equipment's "as-built" condi- tion matches the quote's specifications. We strongly advise following this step as correcting mistakes is easier in the factory than after delivery. There may be better ways to organize a sales organization, but some form of the system above has served us well for the last 88 years. Okay, there was no internet in 1957, but you know what I mean. PCB007 Don Ball is a process engineer at Chemcut. To read past columns or to contact Ball, click here. Researchers have demonstrated a new technique that allows "self-driving laboratories" to collect at least 10 times more data than previous techniques at record speed. The advance, published in Nature Chemical Engineering, dramatically expedites materi- als discovery research, while slashing costs and envi- ronmental impact. Self-driving laboratories are robotic platforms that combine machine learning and automation with chemi- cal and materials sciences to discover materials more quickly. The automated process allows machine-learn- ing algorithms to use data from each experiment to predict which experiment to conduct next to achieve the goal programmed into the system. Until now, self-driving labs utilizing continuous flow reactors have relied on steady-state flow experi- ments. In these experiments, different precursors are mixed together and chemical reactions take place, while continuously flowing in a microchannel. Steady- state flow experiments require the self-driving lab to wait for the chemical reaction before characteriz- ing the resulting material. That means the system sits idle while the reactions occur, which can take up to an hour per experiment. "We've now created a self-driving lab that makes use of dynamic flow experiments, where chemical mixtures are continuously varied through the sys- tem and are monitored in real time," Abolhasani says. "In other words, rather than running separate sam- ples through the system and testing them one at a time after reaching steady-state, we've created a sys- tem that essentially never stops running. The sam- ple is moving continuously through the system and, because the system never stops characterizing the sample, we can capture data on what is taking place in the sample every half second. (Source: North Carolina State University) This AI-powered Lab Runs Itself—and Discovers New Materials 10x Faster