Modelling of particle nucleation and growth in binary alloys under elastic deformation: An application to a Cu–0.95wt%Co alloy

A mean field model of agglomeration as an extension to existing precipitation models

“…The third part presents the core novelty of this work, that is the equivalent agglomeration model (EAM) dedicated to agglomeration by contact beetween growing precipitates. The nucleation radius r nuc and the number of precipitates nucleating per unit volume of matrix and per time unit (hereafter abbreviated volumic nucleation rate) are calculated from the classical nucleation theory, as used by Den Ouden [32]. Figure 2 illustrates the typical representative curve of the free enthalpy change (resulting from chemical, elastic and interface contributions) when inserting a spherical precipitate in the matrix as a function of its radius, which defines the free enthalpy barrier ∆G c and the nucleation radius r nuc .…”

“…Modeling precipitation kinetics at different length and time scales is then a key topic. Different approaches range from the atomic to the macroscopic length and time scales: atomistic kinetic Monte-Carlo [1,2,3,4], molecular dynamics [5,6,7] (including their "coarse" variation [8]), cluster dynamics [4,9,10,11,12], phase fields [13,14,15,16,17,18], classical nucleation [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,3] and growth [26,27,28,29] theories, used in [30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37] and reviewed in [38], Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogorov equation [39,40,41,42,43,44].…”