High‐Throughput Development of Advanced Metallic Glasses via Compositionally Graded Thin‐Film Combinatorial Strategy

ABSTRACT

Advanced metallic glasses, leveraging their ultrahigh strength, excellent corrosion resistance, superior soft magnetic properties and good biocompatibility, have gradually become indispensable strategic cornerstones in critical fields such as aerospace, electronic information and energy power. This unique combination of properties enables them to adapt to extreme service environments, demonstrating application potential far exceeding that of traditional crystalline alloys. With the continuous development of materials science, metallic glasses are rapidly advancing toward multicomponent designs. The combination and matching of multiple elements lead to complex and diverse changes in the correlation between composition and performance, forming an extremely vast exploration space. However, the traditional “trial‐and‐error” development model is struggling to keep up, not only consuming a large number of resources but also extending the development cycle to several years. It is difficult to meet the urgent demand of modern industry for new high‐performance materials. Against this backdrop, combinatorial materials science integrated with high‐throughput characterization technology has gradually emerged. Through parallel experimental design and rapid data collection, the material screening process that originally took years is compressed into weeks. This review focuses on the combinatorial development and high‐throughput evaluation technologies of metallic glasses, with particular emphasis on compositionally graded thin‐film libraries. Such libraries can achieve continuous gradient changes in composition on a single substrate, covering thousands of different alloy ratios at one time. The review systematically integrates high‐throughput testing schemes for four core properties. For mechanical properties, the hardness, strength, toughness and wear resistance can be accurately quantified via nanoindentation technology. In the characterization of soft magnetic properties, magneto‐optical Kerr effect was used to quickly obtain core parameters such as the saturation magnetic flux density and coercivity. For corrosion resistance, two strategies based on electron work function and interatomic bond strength were innovatively adopted to reveal the corrosion mechanism. In the evaluation of biocompatibility, through quantitative analysis of antibacterial activity, the inhibitory effect of materials on common pathogenic bacteria can be intuitively judged. Through these multi‐dimensional high‐throughput characterization technologies, this review has successfully established a complete basic paradigm for the high‐throughput development of metallic glasses. In addition, this review also prospectively outlines the future development direction of metallic glass development, the deep integration of artificial intelligence‐driven closed‐loop research and high‐throughput computation. In this model, machine learning algorithms can conduct in‐depth mining and pattern recognition of massive composition‐property data generated by high‐throughput experiments, and high‐throughput computation methods can reveal the intrinsic mechanism of composition regulating performance at the atomic level. This closed‐loop system of “theoretical prediction‐experimental verification‐data feedback‐model optimization” is promoting the development of metallic glasses from blind screening relying on experience to a new stage of rational design based on data and theory. Overall, this review not only systematically sorts out the scattered research results in the field of high‐throughput development of metallic glasses, but also provides a feasible technical path for the industry, facilitating the practical application of customized metallic glasses in actual production.