Novel High-Throughput Characterization Method for Soft Material Bulk Mechanical Properties

In the current pipeline for novel materials discovery to widespread adoption, new materials can be synthesized far faster than they can be characterized. This undesirable bottleneck is largely caused by the limited throughput of current materials characterization methods. There are few existing high-throughput mechanical testing methods, as simultaneously applying the same mechanical force on many samples is difficult. Moreover, the existing methods are either too costly or complicated to perform on a sufficiently widespread scale. We aim to help alleviate this bottleneck with a novel centrifugation-based high-throughput characterization method for bulk mechanical properties of soft materials. Centrifugation is used to exert a uniform force on stainless steel microparticles that have been embedded in hundreds of different material samples on a well plate. These particles then exert a stress on the samples and eventually break them, allowing us to measure the maximum stress each sample can withstand. The data we obtain from this method shows strong correlation with standard indentation testing. One major benefit of this method is that it is simple to perform and requires only common laboratory equipment, such as well plates and a standard tabletop centrifuge. This technique can easily reach a throughput of thousands of samples per run, with the only limitations being the sizes of the well plate and the centrifuge. Due to the relative simplicity, low cost, and extremely high throughput of this method, we believe it could help to expedite the pipeline from discovery to widespread adoption of novel materials. In addition to overcoming the bottleneck of materials characterization, this method could potentially be utilized to generate massive databases of material properties. These databases could then be fed into machine learning algorithms to generate predictive models that can aid in the discovery and creation of novel materials with desired properties.