Crystal growth velocity in deeply undercooled melts of glass forming Zr-based alloys
Mechanical Properties of Metallic Materials and their Microstructural Origins
Final Report Abstract
Though a maximum in the solidification velocity versus undercooling curve is theorized long ago and experimentally observed for many non-metallic systems, a direct observation in the case of metals remained elusive for a very long time. However, the sophisticated electrostatic levitation technique makes it possible to attain large supercoolings required to enter the diffusion controlled regime of atomic attachment during solidification in the case of glassforming intermetallics. Thus, the Ni-Zr system, an ideal candidate for such experiments, is employed to study the competition between the driving force for crystallization and the diffusion limited attachment kinetics resulting in the observed maximum in the velocity-undercooling curve. These experiments are performed by the project partners at German Aerospace Center (DLR), Cologne. Further, in case of cooperative solidification of alloys, the growth dynamics has always been studied in the low Peclet numbers regime and in unidirectional setting of Bridgman type cells. Remedying this, the composition and undercooling dependence of cooperative growth morphologies and kinetics is investigated through levitation experiments at DLR. Due to the high costs involved in performing and maintaining the associated controlled environments of the ESL experiments, it is desirable to develop cost effective means of gaining insights into the developing microstructures in the form of computer simulations. Thus, trust-worthy numerical models have to be developed, optimized and validated against the experimental observations. In this direction, comprehensive and robust phase-field models are developed and implemented on high performance computers utilizing advanced parallelization schemes by the project partners at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe. The experimental and numerical results are interpreted within the context of the existing theories of cooperative and dendritic growth. The differences and deviations observed are attributed to various approximations and simplifications implemented in the theories and appropriate improvements and generalizations are formulated. The findings also revealed many interesting future directions of research.
Publications
- Dendrite growth in Cu50 Zr50 glass-forming melts, thermodynamics versus kinetics, EPL 105 (2014) 36001
H. Wang, D.M. Herlach, R.P. Liu
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/105/36001) - Dendrite growth velocity in the undercooled melt of glass forming Ni50 Zr50 compound, Philosophical Magazine Letters 97 (2017) 249-256
R. Kobold, W.W. Kuang, H. Wang, W. Hornfeck, M. Kolbe, D.M. Herlach
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09500839.2017.1330561) - Analyzing the cooperative growth of intermetallic phases with a curved solidification front, Acta Materialia 159 (2018) 135-149
Sumanth Nani Enugala, Britta Nestler, Kumar Ankit
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2018.08.017) - Quasicrystal nucleation and Z module twin growth in an intermetallic glass-forming system, Nature Communications 9 (2018) 4054
W. Hornfeck, R. Kobold, M. Kolbe, M. Conrad, D.M. Herlach
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06597-0) - Extension of Jackson-Hunt analysis for curved solid-liquid interfaces, Journal of Crystal Growth 512 (2019) 230-240
Sumanth Nani Enugala, Britta Nestler
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrysgro.2019.01.025) - Theoretical and numerical investigation of rod growth of an Ni-Zr eutectic alloy, Journal of Materials Science (2019) 54: 12605
Sumanth Nani Enugala, Michael Kellner, Raphael Kobold, Johannes Hötzer, Matthias Kolbe, Britta Nestler, Dieter Herlach
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-019-03802-3)
