An active area of research within CAMM is the use of the combinatorial approach. The term indicates a set of tools or methods that CAMM exploits to accelerate the generation of new science or maturation of new/existing materials.  Several of the pieces of equipment within CAMM can be used to facilitate combinatorial approaches.  The first approach was the use of elemental blends in the LENS™ system to rapidly vary composition and determine the influence on properties in binary alloys such as the Ti-xMo and Ti-xV system.  The work expanded into multi-component alloy systems for inclusion in neural network schemes, and began to exploit characterization techniques such as the Dual-Beam FIB for site-specific TEM foil extraction to precisely determine the effect of nano-scaled precipitates on properties and the exact composition of metastable phase boundaries (e.g., a’ to a” transition in Ti-alloys).  The most recent work takes advantage of CAMM-based material processing and testing routes, specifically the Gleeble and the Instron ETMT, to rapidly effect changes in thermal history, microstructure, and mechanical properties.  The combinatorial approach has been applied to:

• Otimization studies of Ti-6Al-4V
• Alloy development schemes for new high temperature titanium alloys
• Metastable Phase Transformation Studies
• Rapid Determination of TTT diagrams for Ti-5553