Advancements in lithium battery technology heavily rely on the design and engineering of electrolytes. However, current schemes for molecular design and recipe optimization of electrolytes lack an effective computational-experimental closed loop and often fall short in accurately predicting diverse electrolyte formulation properties. In this work, we introduce Uni-ELF, a novel multi-level representation learning framework to advance electrolyte design. Our approach involves two-stage pretraining: reconstructing three-dimensional molecular structures at the molecular level using the Uni-Mol model, and predicting statistical structural properties (e.g., radial distribution functions) from molecular dynamics simulations at the mixture level. Through this comprehensive pretraining, Uni-ELF is able to capture intricate molecular and mixture-level information, which significantly enhances its predictive capability. As a result, Uni-ELF substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting both molecular properties (e.g., melting point, boiling point, synthesizability) and formulation properties (e.g., conductivity, Coulombic efficiency). Moreover, Uni-ELF can be seamlessly integrated into an automatic experimental design workflow. We believe this innovative framework will pave the way for automated AI-based electrolyte design and engineering.
@article{arxiv.2407.06152,
title = {Uni-ELF: A Multi-Level Representation Learning Framework for Electrolyte Formulation Design},
author = {Boshen Zeng and Sian Chen and Xinxin Liu and Changhong Chen and Bin Deng and Xiaoxu Wang and Zhifeng Gao and Yuzhi Zhang and Weinan E and Linfeng Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06152},
year = {2024}
}