Science and technology in high-entropy alloys

As human improve their ability to fabricate materials, alloys have evolved from simple to complex compositions, accordingly improving functions and performances, promoting the advancements of human civilization. In recent years, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted tremendous attention in various fields. With multiple principal components, they inherently possess unique microstructures and many impressive properties, such as high strength and hardness, excellent corrosion resistance, thermal stability, fatigue, fracture, and irradiation resistance, in terms of which they overwhelm the traditional alloys. All these properties have endowed HEAs with many promising potential applications. An in-depth understanding of the essence of HEAs is important to further developing numerous HEAs with better properties and performance in the future. In this paper, we review the recent development of HEAs, and summarize their preparation methods, composition design, phase formation and microstructures, various properties, and modeling and simulation calculations. In addition, the future trends and prospects of HEAs are put forward.