Current Status of Combinatorial and High-Throughput Methods for Discovering New Materials and Catalysts

Combinatorial technology has been evaluated as the revolutionary approach to overcome the limitation of conventional research and to advance research in the development of novel materials and catalysts. For the past decade, because of the advance in library synthetic method and characterization tools, combinatorial and high-throughput methodology surprisingly matured and nowadays has been extended to discovering novel olefin polymerization catalysts. However, despite such an advance, the characterization methodology did not keep pace with the increase in library density and limited the application of combinatorial technology. Therefore, in combinatorial technologies, the development of novel characterization methods is urgent and very important. In this review, we introduce several characterization tools and synthetic apparatus that are currently applied to discovering inorganic materials and catalysts using combinatorial technology, and consider how to overcome these limitations.