New strategies and tests to accelerate discovery and development of multi-principal element structural alloys

Abstract

High throughput, combinatorial approaches dramatically accelerate the discovery and development of functional materials, where properties depend primarily on composition. In structural materials, many properties depend sensitively on sample dimensions and microstructural length scales, complicating sample miniaturization that is critical to high throughput techniques. As a result, high throughput tests to rapidly evaluate structural materials are not currently available to meet the challenges offered by the extreme numbers of alloy compositions and microstructures. Here we develop a strategy to accelerate the exploration of conventional and multi-principle element structural alloys, and describe new tests for the rapid evaluation of structural alloys.