Accelerated discovery of nanostructured high-entropy alloys and multicomponent alloys via high-throughput strategies

Nanostructured materials (NsMs) exhibit many interesting and useful properties; yet their grain sizes or phases are generally unstable at elevated temperatures, limiting their process methods and engineering applications. Many emerging alloys, especially high-entropy alloys (HEAs) and related multicomponent alloys, are reported to show enhanced thermal stability and mechanical strength. The identification of mechanically strong and thermally stable multicomponent alloys out of a vast compositional space, however, is a daunting task – many are predominantly developed through sequential and time-consuming trial-and-error approaches. Thus, high-throughput strategies are urgently needed to accelerate the discovery of new and useful nanostructured HEAs (Ns-HEAs). As the fields of Ns-HEAs and high-throughput methods are developing rapidly, an avenue of research on this topic is to be exploited. This review focuses on the literature on the high-throughput fabrication, characterization, and testing of the microstructures, phases, compositions, mechanical properties, and thermal stabilities of a wide range of Ns-HEAs reported over the past two decades. This article also includes recent high-throughput methods that could be potentially used for the discovery of new Ns-HEAs and related multicomponent alloys, as well as various high-throughput data analysis methods such as theoretical screening, simulation, and machine learning. The article concludes with progress, challenges, and opportunities about the future directions in the accelerated discovery of a wide range of complex alloys via high-throughput methodologies.