High-throughput extraction of the anisotropic interdiffusion coefficients in hcp Mg-Al alloys

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-throughput experimental method combining EPMA and EBSD to accurately determine anisotropic interdiffusion coefficients in Mg-Al alloys, revealing their dependence on composition, orientation, and temperature.

Contribution

It presents a novel high-throughput approach to extract anisotropic interdiffusion coefficients in hcp Mg-Al alloys, integrating composition and grain orientation data.

Findings

Interdiffusion coefficients increase with Al content and rotation angle.

Diffusion along the basal plane is faster than along the c axis.

Explicit expressions for diffusion coefficients as functions of composition, orientation, and temperature.

Abstract

A high-throughput experimental approach is presented to extract the anisotropic interdiffusion coefficient by combining information over the composition profiles obtained by the electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) and the grain orientation spectrum by the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) on polycrystalline diffusion couples. Following the forward-simulation scheme, the interdiffusion coefficients in grains with diverse orientation are obtained and subsequently used to determine the anisotropic interdiffusion coefficients perpendicular (D_\perp (x)) and parallel (D_\parallel (x)) to the c axis of the hcp Mg lattice in a Mg-Al alloy as a function of the Al solute content at 673 K and 723 K, respectively. It was found that the interdiffusion coefficients generally increased with the Al content and the rotation angle with respect to the c axis with a valley point around {\theta} approx 30 {\deg} at 723 K. And it was noticed that diffusion along the basal plane was always faster than along the c axis. A comprehensive explicit expression of the interdiffusion coefficients was provided as a function of Al content, grain orientation and temperature. The anisotropic impurity diffusion coefficients of Al in hcp Mg derived by the extrapolation of the results in this paper are in good agreement with first principles calculations in the literature.