Combinatorial solid-state chemistry of inorganic materials

✍ Scribed by Koinuma, Hideomi; Takeuchi, Ichiro

• Book ID: 109933484
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 806 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1476-1122
• DOI: 10.1038/nmat1157

✦ Synopsis

The practice of materials synthesis is analogous to cooking in the sense that many factors -such as raw materials, tools and recipes -must be carefully selected and optimized by 'tasting'at various stages. The conventional one-by-one method for arriving at a good product takes a lot of time and energy. To compete successfully and claim priority with new products and recipes, one must be able to accelerate the pace of the optimization process. Component miniaturization and integration have played key roles in technological innovation, and they have led to breakthroughs in the electronics industry. In the past two decades, the pharmaceutical and DNA-sequencing industries have witnessed the emergence of similar innovation in the form of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening (see, for example, ref. 1).These techniques are now being extended to the field of materials science and engineering 2-4 .In the combinatorial approach, a large number of compounds with different compositions are synthesized and characterized together in parallel.