Using Genetic Programming for an Advanced Performance Assessment of Industrially Relevant Heterogeneous Catalysts

Beside the ease and speed brought by automated synthesis stations and reactors technologies in materials science, adapted informatics tools must be further developed in order to handle the increase of throughput and data volume, and not to slow down the whole process. This article reports the use of genetic programming (GP) in heterogeneous catalysis. Despite the fact that GP has received only little attention in this domain, it is shown how such an approach can be turned into a very singular and powerful tool for solid optimization, discovery, and monitoring. Jointly with neural networks, the GP paradigm is employed in order to accurately and automatically estimate the whole curve conversion vs. time in the epoxidation of large olefins using titanosilicates, Ti-MCM-41 and Ti-ITQ-2, as catalysts. In contrast to previous studies in combinatorial materials science and high-throughput screening, it was possible to estimate the entire evolution of the catalytic reaction for unsynthesized catalysts. Consequently, the evaluation of the performance of virtual solids is not reduced to a single point (e.g., the conversion level at only one given reaction time or the initial reaction rate). The methodology is thoroughly detailed, while stressing on the comparison between the recently proposed Context Aware Crossover (CAX) and the traditional crossover operator.