Development of Novel High-Throughput Methodologies to Evaluate the Thermal Stability of High-Temperature Thin-Film Crystals for Energy Applications

High temperature materials are used in a variety of energy applications such as jet turbines, high temperature sensors, and solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). Discovery of new materials and their optimization represents a difficult engineering challenge, as the materials have to be designed to have a high figure of merit during intense high temperature operations. The large number of engineering considerations involved in the identification and optimization of such materials makes traditional one-by-one material investigations prohibitively time consuming. The time needed to explore large parameter domains can be significantly decreased through the use of high-throughput experimentation (HTE). HTE is an experimental paradigm where quick-serial or parallel techniques are used to create a library of samples covering multiple material parameters and then rapidly characterize the samples for their figure of merit. This thesis will discuss development the of a HTE framework to investigate crystal phase dynamics of high-temperature thin-film materials and its use in the case-study investigations. The details associated with the design and validation of each portion of the HTE framework will be given, including the development of a sputter model that is used for model-guided sputtered thin-film synthesis, a novel HTE experimental methodology designed for the investigation of high-temperature thin-films, and a semi-supervised machine-learning algorithm is used to automatically extract phase information from the resulting diffraction and spectroscopy data. Finally, a detailed discussion of the application of the HTE framework to the investigation of corrosion resistant Fe-Cr-Al nuclear cladding materials and evaluation of scandia-stabilized-zirconium and bismuth-yttria-ceria thin-films as SOFC electrolyte materials will be given