Prediction of the composition of surface alloys formed via pulsed melting of preliminary deposited coatings

To date, many results of studies of surface alloys have been published, but no approaches have been developed to predict their quantitative composition that can assist to design new types of coatings. This paper proposes a methodology for prediction the atomic and mass contents of elements in the surface alloys formed by pulsed liquid-state mixing of pre-deposited films and an upper layer of a substrate. The methodology validity has been verified experimentally on the example of a Cr-Zr surface alloy that is of particular interest due to its possible use in the nuclear industry. The surface alloy has been synthesized by irradiation of a Cr/Zr film-substrate system with a low-energy high-current electron-beam (LEHCEB) of microsecond duration. The results have showed good agreement between the predicted and experimental data with an accuracy satisfactory for practical applications. Some observed discrepancies are explained by the pulse-to-pulse dispersion of the energy densities during LEHCEB irradiation.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a methodology to predict the composition of surface alloys and verifies its accuracy through experiments, using the example of a Cr-Zr surface alloy that may be used in the nuclear industry.