Composition spread alloy films (CSAFs) are commonly used as libraries for high-throughput screening of composition-property relationships in multicomponent materials science. Because lateral gradients afford two degrees of freedom, an n-component CSAF can, in principle, contain any composition range falling on a continuous two-dimensional surface through an (n - 1)-dimensional composition space. However, depending on the complexity of the CSAF gradients, characterizing and graphically representing this composition range may not be straightforward when n ≥ 4. The standard approach for combinatorial studies performed using quaternary or higher-order CSAFs has been to use fixed stoichiometric ratios of one or more components to force the composition range to fall on some well-defined plane in the composition space. In this work, we explore the synthesis of quaternary Al-Fe-Ni-Cr CSAFs with a rotatable shadow mask CSAF deposition tool, in which none of the component ratios are fixed. On the basis of the unique gradient geometry produced by the tool, we show that the continuous quaternary composition range of the CSAF can be rigorously represented using a set of two-dimensional "pseudoternary" composition diagrams. We then perform a case study of (AlxFeyNi1-x-y)∼0.8Cr∼0.2 oxidation in dry air at 427 °C to demonstrate how such CSAFs can be used to screen an alloy property across a continuous two-dimensional subspace of a quaternary composition space. We identify a continuous boundary through the (AlxFeyNi1-x-y)∼0.8Cr∼0.2 subspace at which the oxygen uptake into the CSAF between 1 and 16 h oxidation time increases abruptly with decreasing Al content. The results are compared to a previous study of the oxidation of AlxFeyNi1-x-y CSAFs in dry air at 427 °C.
Keywords: Al−Fe−Ni−Cr; composition gradient films; high-throughput screening; oxidation; quaternary materials libraries.