Machine Learning-Assisted Prediction of Gas Adsorption and Thermo-Physical Properties in Advanced Carbon-Based Materials
Keywords:
machine learning, gas adsorption, thermo-physical properties, carbon-based materials, material informatics, data infrastructure, governance, robustness, fairness, hexagonal boron nitride, carbon foam, predictive modelingAbstract
The prediction of gas adsorption and thermo-physical properties in advanced carbon-based materials, such as carbon foams, graphene derivatives, and hexagonal boron nitride hybrids, has become a central challenge in the design of next-generation sorbents and thermal management systems. Traditional experimental and simulation-based approaches are constrained by high computational costs, limited throughput, and the combinatorial complexity of material space. Machine learning offers a transformative paradigm by enabling rapid, accurate, and scalable property prediction from structural and compositional descriptors. This paper presents a system-level analysis of machine learning-assisted prediction frameworks, focusing on the architectural, infrastructural, and governance dimensions that underpin their deployment. We examine the trade-offs between representation learning techniques, uncertainty quantification, and data quality in the context of gas adsorption on doped and defective carbon surfaces. We further explore the integration of thermophysical property prediction into broader socio-technical infrastructures, including material informatics databases, open science policies, and reproducibility standards. Drawing on recent advances in first-principles calculations and experimental characterization, we discuss how machine learning models can bridge the gap between atomistic simulations and engineering applications. The paper also critically assesses issues of algorithmic fairness, robustness against out-of-distribution data, and the policy implications of using predictive models in safety-critical contexts such as toxic gas capture and thermal protection systems. By synthesizing insights from computational materials science, data engineering, and governance studies, we propose a framework for sustainable, equitable, and reliable deployment of machine learning in carbon-based material design.
References
1. Butler, K. T., Davies, D. W., Cartwright, H., Isayev, O., & Walsh, A. (2018). Machine learning for molecular and materials science. Nature, 559(7715), 547-555.
2. Raccuglia, P., Elbert, K. C., Adler, P. D. F., Falk, C., Wenny, M. B., Mollo, A., ... & Zeller, M. (2016). Machine-learning-assisted materials discovery using failed experiments. Nature, 533(7601), 73-76.
3. Sing, K. S. W., Everett, D. H., Haul, R. A. W., Moscou, L., Pierotti, R. A., Rouquerol, J., & Siemieniewska, T. (1985). Reporting physisorption data for gas/solid systems with special reference to the determination of surface area and porosity. Pure and Applied Chemistry, 57(4), 603-619.
4. Zhang, M., Wang, C., Yu, W., Zhu, Y., & Zhu, P. (2024). Tuning gas adsorption in hexagonal boron nitride by metal and cyclic carbon-metal doping: A first-principles perspective. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 26(12), 9123-9137.
5. Al‐Majali, M. R., Zhang, M., Al‐Majali, Y. T., & Trembly, J. P. (2025). Impact of raw material on thermo‐physical properties of carbon foam. The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, 103(3), 1309-1318.
6. Sun, W., & Ceder, G. (2017). Bayesian optimization for materials design. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 139(38), 13341-13348.
7. Ward, L., Agrawal, A., Choudhary, A., & Wolverton, C. (2016). A general-purpose machine learning framework for predicting properties of inorganic materials. npj Computational Materials, 2, 16028.
8. Fernández, M., & Barnard, A. S. (2019). Identification of structural features that drive colloidal stability in gold nanoparticles using machine learning. Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, 552, 326-333.
9. Gilmer, J., Schoenholz, S. S., Riley, P. F., Vinyals, O., & Dahl, G. E. (2017). Neural message passing for quantum chemistry. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, 70, 1263-1272.
10. Rasmussen, C. E., & Williams, C. K. I. (2006). Gaussian processes for machine learning. MIT Press.
11. Zhao, J., Zhang, M., Wang, C., Yu, W., Zhu, Y., & Zhu, P. (2025). First-principles study of CO, NH3, HCN, CNCl, and Cl2 gas adsorption behaviors of metal and cyclic C–metal B-and N-site-doped h-BNs. Electronic Materials Letters, 21(2), 268-288.
12. Raissi, M., Perdikaris, P., & Karniadakis, G. E. (2019). Physics-informed neural networks: A deep learning framework for solving forward and inverse problems involving nonlinear partial differential equations. Journal of Computational Physics, 378, 686-707.
13. Jain, A., Ong, S. P., Hautier, G., Chen, W., Richards, W. D., Dacek, S., ... & Ceder, G. (2013). Commentary: The Materials Project: A materials genome approach to accelerating materials innovation. APL Materials, 1(1), 011002.
14. Lejaeghere, K., Bihlmayer, G., Björkman, T., Blaha, P., Blügel, S., Blum, V., ... & Cottenier, S. (2016). Reproducibility in density functional theory calculations of solids. Science, 351(6280), aad3000.
15. Ghiringhelli, L. M., Vybiral, J., Levchenko, S. V., Draxl, C., & Scheffler, M. (2015). Big data of materials science: Critical role of the descriptor. Physical Review Letters, 114(10), 105503.
16. Li, T., Sahu, A. K., Talwalkar, A., & Smith, V. (2020). Federated learning: Challenges, methods, and future directions. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 37(3), 50-60.
17. Cheng, Y., Wang, D., Zhou, P., & Zhang, T. (2018). A survey of model compression and acceleration for deep neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09282.
18. Parisi, G. I., Kemker, R., Part, J. L., Kanan, C., & Wermter, S. (2019). Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review. Neural Networks, 113, 54-71.
19. Schütt, K. T., Sauceda, H. E., Kindermans, P. J., Tkatchenko, A., & Müller, K. R. (2018). SchNet – A deep learning architecture for molecules and materials. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 148(24), 241722.
20. Zügner, D., Akbarnejad, A., & Günnemann, S. (2018). Adversarial attacks on neural networks for graph data. Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2847-2856.
21. Gómez-Bombarelli, R., Wei, J. N., Duvenaud, D., Hernández-Lobato, J. M., Sánchez-Lengeling, B., Sheberla, D., ... & Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2018). Automatic chemical design using a data-driven continuous representation of molecules. ACS Central Science, 4(2), 268-276.
22. National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2021). Guidelines for the validation of computational models for materials science. NIST Special Publication 1200-16.
23. Choudhary, K., DeCost, B., & Tavazza, F. (2020). Transfer learning for property prediction of materials. npj Computational Materials, 6, 173.
24. Kim, J., & Lee, H. (2021). Machine learning prediction of thermal conductivity of carbon foams using limited experimental data. Carbon, 174, 456-464.
25. Park, H., & Sholl, D. S. (2020). Machine learning for high-throughput screening of metal-organic frameworks for gas capture. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 8(42), 22361-22374.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.