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

TL;DR

This study uses a phase-field model to investigate how confinement influences dendritic growth in pure materials and binary alloys, revealing boundary effects on tip dynamics and growth dimensionality.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of confinement effects on dendritic solidification using phase-field simulations, including boundary condition impacts and dimensionality switching.

Findings

Decreasing domain size alters dendrite tip velocity and curvature.

Finite boundaries can cause a transition from 3-D to 2-D growth.

Model results agree with experimental observations.

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.