{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp12_substrate_denial72_20260805","cell_id":"search_space_pruning__chemistry_materials","arm":"CONSTRAINED_HIGH","candidate_id":"search_space_pruning__chemistry_materials__CONSTRAINED_HIGH","decision":"PROPOSAL","abstention_reason":null,"proposal":{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp12_substrate_denial72_20260805","cell_id":"search_space_pruning__chemistry_materials","arm":"CONSTRAINED_HIGH","candidate_id":"search_space_pruning__chemistry_materials__CONSTRAINED_HIGH","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Sacrificial exposure coupon that physically prunes corrosion-resistant coating libraries","problem":"A combinatorial library may contain hundreds of spatially separated coating compositions, while detailed electrochemical, mechanical, and microscopic characterization of every composition is costly. Many candidates cannot be useful because they fail mandatory environmental-stability or substrate-adhesion constraints, but informal early selection risks overlooking unusual viable composition regions.","actors":["Spatially indexed coating-composition patches","Metal substrate coupons","Corrosive service-simulant solution","Thermal-cycling environment","Unexposed replicate witness coupon","Materials laboratory investigator"],"observable_state":"After controlled environmental exposure, some indexed coating patches retain measurable material and adhesion while others undergo observable dissolution, blistering, cracking, or delamination. Replicate positions and etched coordinates permit each remaining or erased patch to be associated with its original composition.","consequence":"Without a defensible early gate, scarce characterization capacity is spent on coatings already unable to survive necessary conditions; with an overly aggressive gate, viable composition regions can be physically erased before their properties are examined.","affected_objective":"Reduce the number of coating compositions entering expensive downstream characterization while retaining candidates that satisfy prespecified minimum material-retention and adhesion constraints and preserving recoverable representatives of excluded composition regions.","intervention":"Fabricate matched, spatially indexed replicas of a combinatorial coating library. Keep one replica unexposed as a reentry witness. Subject a sacrificial replica to a staged sequence of physically relevant chemical exposure and thermal cycling. Each stage is calibrated with positive and negative control coatings. Dissolution, blistering, cracking, or delamination physically removes or disables patches that cannot meet a necessary stability constraint; intact patches constitute the reduced library presented to costly characterization. Use a separate audit replica to test selected excluded patches under isolated stages, protecting against false exclusions caused by exposure order or spatial nonuniformity.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Search Space Definition","domain_realization":"All indexed composition patches deposited in the combinatorial coating library."},{"archetype_element":"Candidate or Region Representation","domain_realization":"Each patch is one candidate, and contiguous ranges of substrate coordinates represent neighboring composition regions."},{"archetype_element":"Objective or Success Criterion","domain_realization":"A candidate must retain coating material and adhesion after specified service-relevant exposure before its more expensive properties merit evaluation."},{"archetype_element":"Constraint Filter","domain_realization":"The chemical and thermal environments embody mandatory stability constraints directly in matter and energy."},{"archetype_element":"Feasibility Test","domain_realization":"Post-exposure material retention, cracking, blistering, and adhesion are measured on each indexed patch using direct inspection, profilometry, or a mechanical probe."},{"archetype_element":"Pruning Rule","domain_realization":"A patch that loses material or adhesion beyond a prespecified threshold, including measurement uncertainty, is physically absent or marked infeasible and does not remain on the sacrificial coupon for downstream characterization."},{"archetype_element":"Diversity Preservation Rule","domain_realization":"Surviving patches are retained across separated composition regions rather than only around the largest surviving cluster, and the unexposed witness preserves every original region."},{"archetype_element":"False-Negative Review","domain_realization":"Selected excluded patches are tested on the audit replica under isolated exposures, with extra sampling near pass/fail boundaries."},{"archetype_element":"Reentry or Exception Path","domain_realization":"A composition can be remade from the unexposed indexed witness or source recipe if isolated-stage testing contradicts its exclusion."},{"archetype_element":"Pruning Audit Trail","domain_realization":"Etched coordinates, physical remnants, control patches, and the matched witness coupon preserve the material correspondence between original, excluded, and surviving candidates."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"constraint_filtering","role":"Chemical dissolution and mechanically observable adhesion loss remove coating candidates that violate necessary physical constraints before deeper evaluation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the staged physical exposures, infeasible and feasible coatings remain materially indistinguishable in the library, so no constraint-based pruning occurs."},{"mechanism_slug":"safety_or_compliance_exclusion","role":"Exposure conditions exclude compositions unable to tolerate the minimum material environment specified for the intended application.","counterfactual_removal":"Removing this gate allows chemically incompatible compositions to proceed into downstream tests despite failure of a mandatory material requirement."},{"mechanism_slug":"sample_audit_of_exclusions","role":"A separate replica retains selected samples from erased regions for isolated-stage retesting and detection of false exclusions.","counterfactual_removal":"The primary physical pruning still occurs, but there is no direct material test for exposure-order artifacts, spatial gradients, or borderline false negatives."}],"causal_chain":["A large indexed coating library exceeds available capacity for full characterization.","Necessary service constraints are translated into controlled chemical and thermal exposures on a sacrificial replica.","Candidate patches interact directly with those environments through corrosion, dissolution, stress generation, cracking, and interfacial debonding.","Patches lacking required stability lose material or adhesion, whereas feasible patches remain physically accessible.","The coupon therefore contains a smaller material set for expensive electrochemical, mechanical, or microscopic testing.","A matched witness and independently exposed audit replica allow suspicious exclusions and boundary regions to be recovered and retested."],"baseline":"Characterize every composition with the full suite of expensive tests, or select a few compositions informally from the as-deposited library without first applying a reproducible necessary-condition screen.","nearest_rivals":["Computational thermodynamic or corrosion-model screening before any physical exposure","High-throughput electrochemical mapping of every library patch","A single severe immersion test without staged exposures, controls, or retained replicas","Testing a sparse composition grid and interpolating across the untested regions"],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Unlike model-based ranking or sparse sampling, the proposed gate narrows the library through direct chemical and mechanical failure under necessary conditions; unlike a single destructive screen, matched witness and audit replicas preserve composition-region diversity and permit reentry. Whether this produces acceptably few false exclusions remains an empirical question.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The materials principal investigator may authorize the bounded coupon experiment within existing laboratory chemical-hygiene and equipment limits; the responsible safety authority retains control over exposure conditions and waste handling.","authorized_first_step":"Run a bench-scale, microvolume trial on matched coupons containing 36 indexed coating patches, including independently characterized control patches and representatives distributed across the composition space; compare sacrificial-gate outcomes with isolated tests on matching replicas.","excluded_actions":["Scaling to bulk corrosive volumes","Using unapproved reactive, pressurized, or high-temperature environments","Discarding the only source material or unexposed witness","Treating disappearance caused by a deposition defect as proof of chemical infeasibility","Advancing the gate to consequential production qualification before the bounded comparison"],"halt_rollback":"Stop, quench or neutralize the exposure, and preserve all coupons if controls behave contrary to their same-study characterization, exposure is visibly nonuniform, containment fails, or replicate outcomes diverge materially. Roll back exclusions by returning to the unexposed witness and remaking the affected compositions."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Patch loss correlates with coupon position, starting thickness, or deposition defects rather than composition, or nominally identical replicas disagree about which patches survive.","problem_falsifier":"The candidate library is already small enough for complete testing, full characterization is no more costly than the proposed gate, or no necessary early stability constraint can be specified independently of the final performance objective.","intervention_falsifier":"The sacrificial gate excludes patches whose matched replicas satisfy the same complete service-condition test, fails to exclude patches that clearly fail that test, or produces pass/fail outcomes dominated by exposure order and spatial gradients.","risks":["Over-pruning viable compositions near a threshold","Confounding intrinsic corrosion resistance with initial thickness or adhesion variation","Cumulative exposure interactions that do not represent service conditions","Loss of composition identity through misregistration between replicas","Hazardous exposure, neutralization, or waste-handling failures","Preserving apparent diversity by coordinates that do not correspond to meaningful compositional differences"]},"next_evidence_step":"On the 36-patch matched-coupon trial, prespecify retention and adhesion thresholds from same-study controls, expose one replica through the staged gate, test corresponding patches on another replica using isolated and complete conditions, and count false exclusions, false retentions, spatial clustering, and replicate disagreement before considering a larger library.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed against other proposals because runtime isolation prohibits inspecting them; this candidate is grounded only in the supplied archetype and domain card.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Construct one causally explicit search-space-pruning intervention in chemistry and materials science","Make the essential intervention physical rather than computational or procedural","Include false-negative review and a material reentry path","Bound the first evidence step"],"conceptual_changes":["Mapped candidate pruning to selective physical survival of a replicated combinatorial coating library."],"operational_changes":["Specified sacrificial, witness, and audit replicas with staged exposure and control patches."],"evidence_changes":["Defined a bounded matched-coupon comparison capable of detecting false exclusions, false retentions, and spatial artifacts."],"claim_changes":["Restricted the claim to a testable contrast between direct material gating and model-based or unaudited screening; made no novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect-size claim."]},"substrate_contract":{"primary_allowed_process":"PHYSICAL_MATERIAL","counterfactual_independence":"The essential effect is the direct chemical dissolution, cracking, blistering, or interfacial delamination of infeasible coating patches and the resulting physical survival of other patches. If all software, algorithmic inference, databases, dashboards, reporting, incentives, authorization rules, and procedural enforcement are removed, the exposure still erases or disables failing material and leaves a smaller set of intact patches. Manual coordinate reading or simple instruments may document the result but do not create it.","forbidden_channel_audit":"No algorithm ranks candidates, no sensor requires downstream analytics to perform the exclusion, and no policy or workflow supplies the operative gate. Governance is limited to laboratory safety and authorization. The only optional computation would be record keeping or descriptive analysis after the physically pruned coupon already exists."}}}