By Jim Bullock, August 2024
I recently attended Formulation 4.0 an event organised by the Formulation Science and Technology Group (FSTG) of the Royal Society of Chemistry which promised to continue “the story of bringing digital to all aspects of formulation”. There is no doubt that the use of automation and digitisation tools by formulators has grown rapidly in the last dozen years, with AI (artificial intelligence) coming to the fore more recently.
FSTG events are usually well-attended, varied and interesting and this was no exception with a nice balance of industry and academia amongst the attendees and speakers. All of the speakers did a fine job of presenting their areas of expertise, but for me the highlights were:
- Sam Munday (Data Revival) who is using AI to tackle the perennial challenge of getting disparate (and often historic) data and information into digital systems so that it can be made better use of by scientists. Given that this information can include a wide variety of handwritten lab notebooks, chemical structures, numerical tables, graphs and publications, it was impressive to see the progress being made.
- Roberto Hart-Villamil (University of Birmingham) who has built digital models of ploughshare mixers using CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and validated those models experimentally by tracking mixing behaviour using PEPT (positron emission particle tracking). So far so good, but the next step was for me the most interesting. An evolutionary algorithm was used to generate a set of new mixer geometries which were modelled, with the best design (i.e. that with the most efficient mixing) being selected to produce a further generation of geometries – and so on until an optimum was reached. Despite requiring a lot of computational power and some fancy hardware I think Darwin would have been intrigued with this example of “not-so-natural” selection.
- Karen Ho (Gravel AI) who described a completely different approach with AI. She has taken a different approach to produce a tool for the personal care industry which can generate a commercial and technical analysis of the current market for formulations and ingredients as well being able to profile the activity of manufacturers. Clearly something which could be of great commercial value to many companies in the industry.
So congratulations to FSTG for highlighting this important area, I suspect that in a few years time, the way that many of us tackle formulation will be radically altered by these new approaches.
