Materials Science and Development of Complex Materials

Abstract: The increasing demands on materials across fields poses a grand challenge and requires the development and therefore understanding of increasingly more complex materials. Current material development and characterization methods are challenged and often unsuited for complex and technological relevant materials. This is quantified by an order of magnitude analysis revealing that only a minute fraction of possible materials have been considered thus far. Complex materials span across all sorts of fields. We are focusing on metallic glasses, thermal liquids, electrochemical catalysts materials, colorful metals, and biocompatible and biodegradable alloys. To deal with the increasingly complex chemistry of materials we are developing combinatorial strategies and high throughput characterization methods. We use a custom designed sputtering system that allows us to create approximately 1000 different alloys of multicomponent nature simultaneously. One focus is the development of high throughput characterization methods specific for the effective determination of properties, often in a massive parallel manner. Such methods are used to correlate alloys’ chemistry with properties such as liquidus temperature, microstructure, phases and their stability region, structure, glass forming ability in metallic glasses, color, biocompatibility and degradability, and electrochemical activity.