Dynamical solidification behaviors and microstructural evolution during vibrating wavelike sloping plate process

A vibrating wavelike sloping plate process (VWSP) was proposed. Heat and solute transformations, nucleation mechanism and grain growth as well as microstructure evolution were investigated. It is shown that the sloping plate can provide strong undercooling, and a large quantity of heterogonous nuclei appear on the sloping plate surface, wavelike flow and vibration can enable heterogonous nucleus to escape off the plate, which lead to nucleus multiplication. Moreover, wavelike flow and vibration improve solute diffusion coefficient and cause uniform solute and temperature field, which lead to eruptive nucleation. Grain growth has two typical ways, direct globular growth and dendritic growth. Under relative uniform temperature and solute fields, some grains can keep stable growth surface, go on growing with the round surface and finally maintain their globular structure. However, there are always some grains that grow along a certain preferred direction, but under wavelike flow and vibration their dendritic arms break and transform into near spherical structure. During the casting process, microstructural evolution from globular/dendritic structure to globular/equiaxed structure and to globular structure was observed. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.