An Automated Chemical Labratory -- Chemistry with Code

Abstract

An automated, general purpose, chemical synthesizer would accelerate the pace of chemical research by eliminating the need for human beings to do monotonous and repetitive tasks such as heating, mixing, filtering etc. Attempts to implement an automated chemical synthesizer have been either too expensive for most lab groups or cover only a small set of chemical operations, usually only heating, adding, and mixing, which are too restrictive to be useful. This paper proposes a novel architecture that promises to be inexpensive, by using off the shelf hardware, and implements a wide variety of chemical operations. A critical hardware component for this architecture is a multiway switch for chemicals. Its function is to divert fluid to flow from the reaction beaker to modules that run different chemical operations. Two reactions were performed, an acid/base titration and iodine clock reaction. The titration demonstrated low costs syringe pumps and discrimination of reactant color using a camera. The iodine clock reaction demonstrated the implementation of the multiway switch.