Synthesizability – the ability to reliably produce a theoretically predicted material – remains one of the least understood aspects of modern materials science. The newly funded ERC project Autonomous Aerosol Synthesis of Functional Nanomaterials – AEROSYN seeks to address this challenge by combining advanced in situ diagnostics, real-time process monitoring, and machine learning. Rather than treating each experiment as a separate recipe, the team will study synthesis as a dynamic process. The project focuses on high-temperature aerosol and flame-based synthesis routes, which are ready to be used industrially to produce advanced oxide materials.

The central hypothesis of AEROSYN is that even highly complex synthesis processes contain “islands of stability” – regions in process space, where materials formation becomes robust and predictable. By identifying these regions and understanding how they influence materials properties, the project aims to enable more predictable materials synthesis.

“A major challenge in current materials discovery is that the very same material can behave differently depending on how it was synthesized,” says project lead Christof Schulz. “AEROSYN aims to understand and map these process–structure relationships directly, enabling materials discovery strategies that are inherently compatible with scalable manufacturing.” Beyond accelerating discovery, AEROSYN could help bridge the longstanding gap between laboratory-scale exploration and industrial realization, so that questions of manufacturability are built into the research process from the start, rather than treated as an afterthought.

Christof Schulz is Head of the 'Reactive Fluids' research group at the Institute for Energy and Materials Processes at the University of Duisburg-Essen as well as Director of the Research Center for Future Energy Materials and Systems at the Ruhr University Alliance. In 2014, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his pioneering contributions to the fundamentals, technologies and applications of high-resolution laser diagnostic measurement techniques.
ERC Advanced Grant recipients are established, leading scientists with a proven track record of significant research achievements and outstanding, original contributions to their field. Their projects are ambitious, ground-breaking research endeavours, and both the project and the principal investigator are selected solely on the basis of scientific excellence through international peer review.


The Research Centre for Future Energy Materials and Systems (RC FEMS) in a video: where researchers are developing new materials for tomorrow's energy technologies. This short introduction showcases the people and ideas driving this research forward. Professors Christof Schulz and Anna Isaeva share insights into their work on developing novel materials from scratch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m4IVwgdbfQ