Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Conventional fertilizer production relies on centralized, fossil-fuel-intensive processes such as Haber–Bosch ammonia synthesis, with high energy demand and associated carbon emissions. Electrochemical routes to nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers offer a potentially decentralized, renewable-powered alternative, but their practical performance remains limited by the interaction of catalyst structure, electrolyte composition, reactor architecture, and operating conditions. These variables do not act independently: fertilizer synthesis is fundamentally a coupled, high-dimensional optimization problem that is difficult to address by varying one factor at a time. This chapter argues that artificial intelligence becomes genuinely useful for this problem not as an isolated computational tool, but as a layer connecting experimental and sensor data with prediction, optimization, and control. The chapter examines four electrochemical fertilizer pathways nitrogen reduction, nitrate reduction, urea synthesis, and phosphorus recovery alongside the functional materials and electrode architectures used to catalyze them. It then considers the reactors, analytical instrumentation, and real-time, in-situ sensors that generate the data on which these AI applications depend, treating this measurement infrastructure as inseparable from AI-enabled optimization. Three distinct roles for AI and machine learning are developed: discovering and screening catalyst candidates across combinatorial design spaces; predicting process behavior under coupled and time-varying operating conditions; and identifying and maintaining optimal conditions through Bayesian optimization, multi-objective search, and autonomous control. Techno-economic and life-cycle assessment are introduced as additional decision criteria, since chemical performance alone cannot define an optimal process once cost and environmental impact are considered. A fully integrated, autonomous electrochemical fertilizer platform has not yet been demonstrated in the literature reviewed here. Instead, the chapter shows that individual components of such a system, together with several partial integrations from adjacent process industries, already exist and provide a technically credible foundation for future integration. Data scarcity, the DFT–experiment gap, sensor reliability, reproducibility, interpretability, and scale-up nevertheless remain major barriers to realizing this integration in practice.
Source: ChemRxiv
Author: Muhammad Bilal
Language: English
Subfield: Catalysis
Field: Chemical Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213982411