Autonomous heterogeneous catalyst discovery with a self-evolving multi-agent digital twin

Zhilong Song; Zongmin Zhang; Lixue Cheng

cond-mat.mtrl-sciJun 3, 2026

Autonomous heterogeneous catalyst discovery with a self-evolving multi-agent digital twin

Authors: Zhilong Song, Zongmin Zhang, Lixue Cheng

Abstract

Theoretical heterogeneous catalysis promises rapid catalyst discovery, yet computational and machine-learning predictions often deviate from experiment and stay confined to narrow material families, for want of a faithful, condition-aware catalytic simulator. We present CatDT (Catalysis Digital Twin), a self-evolving multi-agent system that builds an autonomous digital twin of a working catalyst, unifying gas-solid and liquid-solid modeling. From only a bulk crystal and a natural-language reaction description, eight specialized agents and 27 scientific tools predict stable facets, reconstruct working surfaces, enumerate and rank reaction pathways, locate transition states, and compute kinetics in 5-30 min on a single GPU. Two innovations address the hardest steps: UniMech finds dominant pathways for novel materials at over $10^3\times$ lower cost than exhaustive enumeration by fusing agent-guided proposals with energy-cached graph search, and a memory-augmented reinforcement loop raises barrier-calculation success from 41% to 84% across 600 catalytic surfaces. Across seven gas-solid benchmarks -- stepped metals, single-atom catalysts, ordered intermetallics, vacancy-rich 2D sulfides and carbides, and a strong-metal--support-interaction (SMSI) interface -- every CatDT prediction lies within 0.5-2 times experiment over four orders of magnitude. For propane dehydrogenation, CatDT independently discovers non-precious candidates rivaling the Pt-based industrial benchmark, with a proposed Ni@ZrO $_2$ SMSI overlayer reaching a simulated TOF of $1.63~\text{s}^{-1}$ at $\sim$ 100% selectivity. More broadly, the decisive factor for a faithful catalyst digital twin -- or any multi-stage scientific simulator -- is not raw LLM capability but the engineered harness around it: deterministic tools, persistent memory, and verified self-improvement that compound across models, tools, and runs.

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