Development of high-throughput rapid heat-treatment and characterization process

Heat treatment plays an important part in materials development, but traditional heat treatment methods can only develop one target temperature/cycle at a time, which impairs the experimental efficiency in the development of new materials. We have therefore introduced the use of high-throughput experiments, changed the traditional sequential iterative method to parallel processing, and developed an efficient multi-temperature-field heat-treatment method. Microwave radiation is used as the heating source, and the method takes advantage of the selective heating ability of microwaves to generate 100 temperature zones that can heat treat 100 individual sheet samples simultaneously. The method incorporates various rapid characterization techniques, which enables a large amount of characterization data to be obtained in a short time. The obtained data can be uploaded to a high-throughput materials database to provide data to support subsequent studies. In this study, high-carbon, high-chromium steel was subjected to parallel tempering heat treatment at 109–786 °C. The relationship between the tempering temperature and the material microstructure and properties was derived from the changes in the microstructure and properties after parallel tempering, and used to verify the feasibility of this method.