Design and Evaluation of a High-Throughput Ball Mill for Parallel Alloy Processing

With growing performance demands, sectors such as aerospace and energy are driven to rapidly develop and optimize advanced materials. High-energy ball milling is a route to produce novel high-performance materials. However, the development of these alloys is typically done serially on a small scale. In addition, this is labor-intensive and costly when one wants to explore a large compositional and processing space. To address this need, we report on a custom high-throughput system capable of parallel processing 24 vessels. This custom system improves experimental flexibility and scalability, enabling rapid parametric studies of diverse alloy compositions. We benchmark this unit against established shaker and vibration HEBM systems using the immiscible Fe-Cu system. Through this, we find that while the custom parallel processing system shows some comparability in lower solute compositions, the higher solute compositions reveal significant differences in driving the immiscible elements into a metastable solid solution between all the HEBM systems.