Combinatorial and High-Throughput Materials Research

Abstract

The success of combinatorial and high-throughput methodologies relies greatly on the availability of various characterization tools with new and improved capabilities [1]. Indeed, how useful can a combinatorial library of 250, 400, 25 000 or 2 000 000 compounds be [2–5] if one is unable to characterize its properties of interest fairly quickly? How useful can a set of thousands of spectra or chromatograms be if one is unable to analyse them in a timely manner? For these reasons, the development of new approaches for materials characterization is one of the most active areas in combinatorial materials science.The importance of this aspect of research in the field has been discussed in numerous conferences including the Pittsburgh Conferences, the American Chemical Society Meetings, the American Physical Society Meetings, the Materials Research Society Symposia and various Gordon Research Conferences.Naturally, the development of new measurement instrumentation attracts the attention not only of practitioners of combinatorial materials science but also of those who design new software for data manipulation and mining. Experimental designs of combinatorial libraries are pursued with available and realistic synthetic and characterization capabilities in mind. It is becoming increasingly critical to link the design of new equipment for high-throughput parallel materials synthesis with integrated measurement tools in order to enhance the efficacy of the overall experimental strategy.We have received an overwhelming response to our proposal and call for papers for this Special Issue on Combinatorial Materials Science. The papers in this issue of Measurement Science and Technology are a very timely collection that captures the state of modern combinatorial materials science. They demonstrate the significant advances that are taking place in the field. In some cases, characterization tools are now being operated in the factory mode. At the same time, major challenges still remain in the rapid characterization of materials in a number of key technological areas. Scientists are taking on the challenges, and we can expect many more innovations in the future.We thank the authors and reviewers for their contributions. Special thanks go to Professor Peter Hauptmann for encouragement and support of this project, and to Natasha Leeper and James Dimond, for their assistance in putting this special issue together.