Phase-field approach to polycrystalline solidification including heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation

Advanced phase-field techniques have been applied to address various aspects of polycrystalline solidification including different modes of crystal nucleation. The height of the nucleation barrier has been determined by solving the appropriate Euler-Lagrange equations. The examples shown include the comparison of various models of homogeneous crystal nucleation with atomistic simulations for the single-component hard sphere fluid. Extending previous work for pure systems (Gr an asy et al 2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 035703), heterogeneous nucleation in unary and binary systems is described via introducing boundary conditions that realize the desired contact angle. A quaternion representation of crystallographic orientation of the individual particles ( outlined in Pusztai et al 2005 Europhys. Lett. 71 131) has been applied for modeling a broad variety of polycrystalline structures including crystal sheaves, spherulites and those built of crystals with dendritic, cubic, rhombo-dodecahedral and truncated octahedral growth morphologies. Finally, we present illustrative results for dendritic polycrystalline solidification obtained using an atomistic phase-field model.