Eutectic and peritectic equilibria in coherent binary alloys

TL;DR

This paper extends thermodynamic models to include coherency strain energy in binary alloys, revealing how stress influences eutectic and peritectic phase equilibria, with significant implications for materials with large lattice mismatches.

Contribution

It introduces a modified equilibrium framework accounting for elastic energy, showing how coherency stress alters classical phase diagrams in binary alloys.

Findings

Coherency stress transforms eutectic points into a continuous equilibrium field.

Peritectic systems are destabilized by coherency stress, potentially eliminating the peritectic reaction.

The effect depends on the geometric relationship between phase compositions and stress-free states.

Abstract

This work extends the Cahn--Larch\'e thermodynamic framework to binary alloys in which two coherent solid phases coexist with an incoherent liquid and investigates how coherency strain energy modifies classical eutectic and peritectic equilibria. We derive equilibrium conditions for three-phase coexistence that include an elastic energy term dependent on the molar fractions of the solid phases and apply them to model binary eutectic and peritectic systems. We find that coherency stress transforms the eutectic point into a finite three-phase equilibrium field spanning a continuous range of compositions and temperatures. In contrast, coherency stress in peritectic systems progressively destabilizes the two-solid equilibrium without generating a stable three-phase field and can suppress the peritectic reaction entirely. This asymmetry is governed by the geometric relationship between the stress-free compositions of the phases: when the liquid composition lies between those of the two solids (eutectic configuration), the liquid serves as a thermodynamic buffer against the coherency penalty on the solid--solid pair; when it lies outside (peritectic configuration), no such mechanism is available. These results demonstrate that coherency stress can fundamentally alter three-phase equilibria involving a liquid and suggest that such effects may be significant in systems with large coherent misfits.