To facilitate data-driven composition-structure-property models suitable for various mechanical and thermal loading conditions, high-throughput material testing methods are highly desirable. In this work, we develop the High-Temperature Dimple Array Bulge Instrument (HT-DABI), a novel materials testing instrument that uses a 5×5 array of induction-heated dimple cells which are inert-gas pressurized to achieve a heterogeneous yet readily resolvable stress condition. Deformation data of the 25 independent cells are measured simultaneously using high-temperature 3D digital image correlation; then, finite-element coupled optimization frameworks extract the elastoplastic and creep properties from the displacement and pressure data. HT-DABI can conduct high-temperature creep experiments parallelized across stress levels, temperatures, and material compositions, as well as elevated-temperature static tensile experiments parallelized across compositions and temperatures. We validate the approach using a wrought IN625 plate and show that this approach can accurately determine the creep exponent and activation energy within 10% of the ground-truth value, at 1/200th of the testing time needed for 25 materials, and the yield stress to within 15%. The DABI system paves the way for a unified component design-testing framework, in which experiments dynamically sample locations in composition space or test interfacial material behavior requested by the optimization framework for rapid co-design of part geometry and composition in a component fabricated from a functionally graded material.

Knowing the thermophysical properties of high-temperature melts can aid the design of melt processes and validate atomic structural models, such as those used in studying glass formation. Property measurements on such melts are challenging, however, due to container-related contamination and heterogeneous nucleation. Containerless processing techniques that employ levitation can be used to avoid these obstacles. In that context, we demonstrate here the application of silhouette imaging to measure the density of molten oxides in an aero-acoustic levitation instrument (AAL). The AAL combines gas jet levitation with actively controlled acoustic positioning to enable full optical access to samples ca. 2–4 mm in diameter, which are laser beam heated and melted. The cross sections of molten drops are imaged using a monochromatic light source and narrowband-filtered camera. Melt volume is calculated from the cross sections and used to find density at several temperatures ranging 1530–1920 K, including up to 350 K of supercooling. We report densities for CaAl2O4, Ca12Al14O33, CaSiO3, their Fe2O3-bearing analogs, and 83TiO2-17RE2O3 (RE = La or Nd). These provide important benchmarks of the capabilities, measurement uncertainties, and future outlook for this technique.