On the role of confinement on solidification in pure materials and binary alloys

Abstract

We use a phase-field model to study the effect of confinement on dendritic growth, in a pure material solidifying in an undercooled melt, and in the directional solidification of a dilute binary alloy. Specifically, we observe the effect of varying the vertical domain extent ($\delta$) on tip selection, by quantifying the dendrite tip velocity and curvature as a function of $\delta$, and other process parameters. As $\delta$ decreases, we find that the operating state of the dendrite tips becomes significantly affected by the presence of finite boundaries. For particular boundary conditions, we observe a switching of the growth state from 3-D to 2-D at very small $\delta$, in both the pure material and alloy. We demonstrate that results from the alloy model compare favorably with those from an experimental study investigating this effect.

13 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (5)

• Phase-Field Formulation for Quantitative Modeling of Alloy Solidification
• Quantitative Phase Field Model of Alloy Solidification
• Phase Field Model for Three-Dimensional Dendritic Growth with Fluid Flow
• Efficient Computation of Dendritic Microstructures using Adaptive Mesh Refinement
• Adaptive Mesh Refinement Computation of Solidification Microstructures using Dynamic Data Structures

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Phase Field Theory of Heterogeneous Crystal Nucleation