Elastic stress effects on microstructural instabilities

Abstract

Microstructure (which, for the purposes of this article, defined as the sizes, shapes and distributions of interfaces in a material) is the key bridge between processing and properties. Hence, a study of the formation and evolution of microstructures is of great interest: see, for example, [1] and references therein. Naturally, during the formation and evolution of microstructures, new interfaces may form and old ones might disappear; in addition, interfaces might merge or split.Instabilities is one of the key phenomena that leads to interesting microstructural features; for example, compositional instabilities in binary alloys aged inside the spinodal region of a miscibility gap lead to spinodal microstructures and dendritic microstructures result from the breaking up of planar solidliquid interfaces during solidification. Martin, Doherty and Cantor, in their * We dedicate this paper to the memory of John W Cahn. His immense contributions to the field of elastic stress induced microstructural instabilities are seen not only in his papers, but also in a large number of acknowledgements that we noticed during the preparation of this manuscript -such as the acknowledgement of Tien and Copley in their classic paper on rafting.