Combinatorial Materials Sciences: Experimental Strategies for Accelerated Knowledge Discovery

Combinatorial materials science offers an exciting experimental strategy for rapidly surveying a wide array of materials chemistries and process variables coupled to the screening of structure and properties. Adapting approaches used in synthetic organic chemistry for applications such as pharmaceutical sciences and chemical discovery, materials scientists have developed a variety of approaches to create libraries in the solid state in order to rapidly examine a broad range of materials characteristics; the ultimate hope is to accelerate the discovery of new materials and/or new materials properties. This article provides an overview of the different experimental strategies used in combinatorial experimentation and high-throughput screening in materials science and engineering and the challenges to analyzing the information obtained from such experiments. Particular focus is placed on the use of informatics to convert the data from high-throughput experimentation to high-throughput knowledge discovery. The review also raises the broader issue of future needs in combinatorial materials science, such as making this area an experimental platform for multiscale modeling, and the need for a stronger materials-theory-driven approach to combinatorial experimentation.