Zeolite crystallization is a metastable process under harsh conditions with poorly understood mechanisms, making the directed synthesis of specific frameworks challenging. Organic structure-directing agents (OSDAs) are key to framework control, but their discovery remains dominated by trial-and-error screening. Here, we develop a domain knowledge-informed machine learning model to predict OSDAs, which enables the successful synthesis of three novel zeolites, namely, ECNU-30, ECNU-34, and ECNU-40 (named after East China Normal University), validating the efficacy of the model. Traditional descriptor-based machine learning models exhibit limited predictive performance in screening OSDAs for unknown zeolite frameworks. Combining an end-to-end architecture with active learning, the ECNU-Zeoformer effectively overcomes this limitation, enabling more accurate prediction of OSDA-zeolite binding energies for selecting suitable OSDAs and superior generalizability to different framework topologies.
Wáng et al. (Wed,) studied this question.