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arXiv · 2606.00779

Autonomous scanning electrochemical cell microscopy enables rapid exploration of large compositionally complex material spaces

Felix Thelen·Moonjoo Kim·Geovane Arruda de Oliveira·Jan Lukas Buergel·Wolfgang Schuhmann·Alfred Ludwig
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Abstract

Alloying is a central strategy in electrocatalysis, enabling fine-tuning of electronic structure. In particular, compositionally complex solid solutions (CCSS) often called high-entropy alloys are of high interest as they allow active site design. However, the "combinatorial explosion" in the number of possible compositions poses a critical bottleneck for the discovery of active CCSS electrocatalysts. We present an autonomous scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM) system for ultrahigh-throughput and large-scale CCSS activity screening. The platform rapidly establishes composition-electrocatalytic activity relationships for large compositional spaces across multiple thin-film CCSS materials libraries via active learning and automated library exchange. Embedding analytical expressions of voltammetry in the algorithm enables the learning of whole voltammograms rather than a single selected metric. As a demonstration, we investigated hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activities of Au-Ir-Rh, where Ir and Rh exhibit strong metal-hydrogen binding and Au exhibits relatively weak binding as derived from the HER volcano plot. The composition-activity trend was accurately predicted after measuring only 15% of all 966 measurement areas. Au30Ir20Rh50 and Au10Ir35Rh55 exhibit highest activities with standard rate constants of about 0.012 cm/s, demonstrating positive synergistic contributions from elemental mixing. The autonomous robotic SECCM platform is broadly applicable to a wide range of electrocatalytic reactions, providing a general pathway for accelerating CCSS electrocatalyst discovery and optimization.

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Felix Thelen, Moonjoo Kim, Geovane Arruda de Oliveira, Jan Lukas Buergel, Wolfgang Schuhmann, Alfred Ludwig. 2026-05-30. Autonomous scanning electrochemical cell microscopy enables rapid exploration of large compositionally complex material spaces. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00779

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