Visualizing High Entropy Alloy Spaces: Methods and Best Practices

Multi-Principal Element Alloys (MPEAs) have emerged as an exciting area of research in materials science in the 2020s, owing to the vast potential for discovering alloys with unique and tailored properties enabled by the combinations of elements. However, the chemical complexity of MPEAs poses a significant challenge in visualizing composition-property relationships in high-dimensional design spaces. Without effective visualization techniques, designing chemically complex alloys is practically impossible. In this methods/protocols article, we present a `toolbox' of visualization techniques that allow for meaningful and insightful visualizations of MPEA composition spaces and property spaces. Our contribution to this toolbox are UMAP projections of entire alloy spaces. We deploy this visualization tool-kit on the following MPEA case studies: 1) Visualizing literature reviews, 2) constraint-satisfaction alloy design scheme, 3) Bayesian optimization alloy design campaigns. Furthermore, we show how this method can be applied to any barycentric design space. While there is no one-size-fits-all visualization technique, our toolbox offers a range of methods and best practices that can be tailored to specific MPEA research needs. This article is intended for materials scientists interested in performing research on multi-principal element alloys, chemically complex alloys, or high entropy alloys, and is expected to facilitate the discovery of novel and tailored properties in MPEAs.