Inorganic Synthesis Reaction Condition Prediction with Generative Machine Learning

Data-driven synthesis planning with machine learning is a key step in the design and discovery of novel inorganic compounds with desirable properties. Inorganic materials synthesis is often guided by chemists' prior knowledge and experience, built upon experimental trial-and-error that is both time and resource consuming. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale text mining of scientific literature, providing open source databases of synthesis information of synthesized compounds, material precursors, and reaction conditions (temperatures, times). In this work, we employ a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) to predict suitable inorganic reaction conditions for the crucial inorganic synthesis steps of calcination and sintering. We find that the CVAE model is capable of learning subtle differences in target material composition, precursor compound identities, and choice of synthesis route (solid-state, sol-gel) that are present in the inorganic synthesis space. Moreover, the CVAE can generalize well to unseen chemical entities and shows promise for predicting reaction conditions for previously unsynthesized compounds of interest.