Development And Application Of Resistance Measurement Based High-throughput Experimental Methods

The development of materials science is strongly related to the progress of human civilization and the well-being of mankind.The continuous stream of new materials keep changing the world and our life.However,limited by the complexity of material itself and the computer performance,material research still mainly relies on the time-consuming trial and error,which makes the material progress far behind the requirements of people.The emergence and development of combinatorial materials science provide a"shortcut" for material research.Using high-throughput synthesis and characterization techniques,those experiments that took months to complete before can be finished within only a few days now,greatly improving the efficiency of the materials research.In this work,a series of high-throughput experimental methods based on resistance measurement are developed and applied to the research of complex material systems.We developed a high-throughput scanning four-point probe resistance measurement system,which can perform resistance measurements for thousands of samples within a few hours.The system is first applied to the screening of potential metallic glasses.According to the great resistivity difference between the crystalline and the amorphous state of alloys,combined with the automated X-ray diffraction technique,we have successfully used this method to screen out the amorphous samples from huge number of candidates.This method can be used for the preliminary screening of the glass forming ability for poorly discovered material systems,avoiding wasting time in the already crystallized samples.Combining the high-throughput scanning four-point probe resistance measurement technique with the high vacuum heat treatment technique,we found that a clear correlation exists between the resistance change upon crystallization of an alloy to its glass forming ability.This correlation has been confirmed in the study of CuZr,CuZrAl,NiZr alloy systems,and may become an effective criterion for estimating the glass forming ability.This new criterion is based entirely on resistance measurements,which can easily achieve high-throughput and fast measurement as compared to the existing criteria based on calorimetric methods(e.g.the reduced glass transition temperature),making it possible to the rapidly screen out bulk metallic glasses.We have also designed a sensor array that can measure the temperature-dependent resistance of a material in the range spans from room temperature to 1500 K.Through finely optimizing the sensor,the temperature uniformity is still better than 1%at 1200 K.Excellent temperature uniformity leads to a very high measurement sensitivity.We have studied the amorphous-crystalline transformation of PdSiCu alloys using this sensor,and successfully observed the relaxation,glass transition,and crystallization of glassy alloys.Besides,the correlation between the resistance ratio of the crystallized to as-deposited sample and the glass forming ability was confirmed again in the PdSiCu alloys.We also studied the influence of elemental proportion of precursors in the synthesis of compound semiconductors on the composition,phase,and morphology of the final compound films,and found that the film synthesized from the precursor with preferred composition range has a single phase,smooth surface,and compact columnar grains.The resistance-temperature sensor has obvious advantages in the screening of optimal composition range and heat treatment process for the complex materials system,so this research provides a potential case for the application of the resistance-temperature sensor.