Image: Alex Mascaraque León y Ángela García Grech

Summer is officially here ☀️, and with it comes swimming pool season. Looking at this month’s image, it might seem like our lab has taken a holiday. A trampoline, a crocodile, a flamingo… 🐊🦩 But appearances can be deceiving. Our “swimming pool” is, in fact, representing a water bath as part of an automated degradation platform, and its guests are not simply enjoying a summer holiday. In this water bath, polymeric materials are immersed in controlled degradation conditions, allowing us to understand how materials change over time when they are exposed to different solutions.

This Image of the Month highlights our automated degradation monitoring system 🤖. In this setup, to allow every sample to have its own degradation environment, Falcon tube caps are replaced by custom polypropylene (PP) caps that hold each sample individually. This modification transforms every tube into an independent degradation chamber. Traditionally, degradation studies have relied on manual handling, with researchers periodically retrieving samples for characterization before returning to repeat the process days or weeks later. While effective, this approach is time-consuming and limits the number of materials and conditions that can be investigated simultaneously.

Every swimming pool needs a lifeguard 🛟. Ours just happens to be a robot. The robot takes care of repetitive and time-consuming operations, ensuring precision and consistency, making sure every sample follows the same protocol. By combining collaborative robotics with a modular degradation platform, we can automate repetitive tasks, increase experimental throughput, improve reproducibility, and explore a much broader range of materials and degradation conditions.