Autonomous laboratories promise end-to-end, self-directing experimentation - but most never reach that promise because of set-up challenges, such as manual wiring and reconciling incompatible file formats. This integration work is fragile and time-consuming, often stalling projects before the first fully autonomous run.
ReactWise and Vapourtec have partnered to remove that barrier. The collaboration delivers a plug-and-play connection between ReactWise's optimization platform and Vapourtec flow reactors, enabling true closed-loop optimization- without needing human intervention during the run.
The scientist defines the campaign parameters, objectives, and constraints in ReactWise. From there, the platform communicates directly with the Vapourtec reactor via API calls with Vapourtec’s OPC UA Server, controlling reactor residence times, reactor temperatures, and reagent equivalents for each experiment. During execution, in-line process analytical technology (PAT) - such as IR or Raman spectroscopy - measures reaction performance in real time. The spectral data flows back to ReactWise, where user-defined calibration functions convert it into concentrations and yields. These results feed the optimizer, which retrains its underlying models and automatically generates the next set of experiments to run, closing the loop without any manual data handling in between.
By removing the manual wiring and file-format management that normally sit between software and instrument, the integration lets autonomous experiments run start to finish. Continuous, adaptive operation increases throughput, since the platform proposes and runs the next experiments automatically rather than waiting on manual setup between iterations.
Automated execution and consistent data handling add rigour, removing a common source of manual error and making runs more reproducible. Finally, teams recover the time previously spent on wiring and data management - redirecting it to interpreting results, the work where scientific judgment matters most.
