Introduction: Combinatorial instruments and techniques

The field of high-throughput materials development has grown tremendously in recent years. Once used only to screen libraries of pharmaceutical compounds, combinatorial techniques are now widely used to synthesize, formulate, and
screen various types of polymeric, inorganic, and hybrid materials. Hundreds of variations of a given functional material can now be evaluated in one day. High-throughput analysis is providing the ability to rapidly discover synergies amongst
multiple ingredients that are simply not possible to discover using traditional techniques.