Does one need to polish electrodes in an eight pattern? Automation provides the answer

Yoshikawa N, Akkoc GD, Pablo-García S, Cao Y, Hao H, Aspuru-Guzik A (2025)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2025

Journal

Digital Discovery Royal Society of Chemistry

DOI: 10.1039/d4dd00323c

Abstract

Automation of electrochemical measurements can accelerate the discovery of new electroactive materials. One of the hurdles to automated electrochemical measurement is the pretreatment of electrodes because mechanical polishing is usually conducted manually. Here we investigate the automation of electrochemical measurements using a robotic arm. We demonstrate automated mechanical polishing using a station with a moving polishing pad and evaluate the effect of different polishing patterns. Our automatic method improved the corroded electrodes, and we found the effect of pattern was not significant, which diverges from the current common belief amongst practitioners that a figure eight pattern is best for pretreatment. This research is a step toward automating electrochemistry experiments without human intervention.

Additional Organisation(s)

Department Chemie- und Bioingenieurwesen (CBI)

Involved external institutions

University of Toronto CA Canada (CA) Forschungszentrum Jülich / Research Centre Jülich (FZJ) DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Yoshikawa, N., Akkoc, G.D., Pablo-García, S., Cao, Y., Hao, H., & Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2025). Does one need to polish electrodes in an eight pattern? Automation provides the answer. Digital Discovery. https://doi.org/10.1039/d4dd00323c

MLA:

Yoshikawa, Naruki, et al. "Does one need to polish electrodes in an eight pattern? Automation provides the answer." Digital Discovery (2025).

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