Experimental strategies for combinatorial and high-throughput materials development.

As high-throughput experimental techniques have become common in the area of materials research, entirely new types of experimental strategies have appeared. The kinds of problems, the desired outcomes, and the appropriate patterns are significantly different from those associated with conventional experimentation. Classical experimental design (design of experiments, DOE) strategies grew up in a period of slow, laborious, error-prone experimentation; a modern high-throughput laboratory can test more materials in a week than was previously done in a year. The goal of this Account is to identify and critically discuss some of the strategies that are being developed and used in this new, exciting area of research.