Quantitative phase field modelling of precipitate coarsening in Ni-Al-Mo alloys

In this paper, we attempt a critical and quantitative comparison between our phase field model and experimental results on coarsening in ternary two phase alloys. For experimental results, we have chosen a specific Ni-Al-Mo alloy [Ni-7.7% Al-7.9% Mo] (at.%). Since the grand potential formulation (Choudhury and Nestler, 2012) has the advantage of being amenable to incorporation of thermodynamic data for all the relevant phases, it is our phase field model of choice for this study. Our attempt is aimed at identifying specific gaps between theory/computation and experiments that may be addressed through future research. A comparison of coarsening rate from our 3D simulations with the experimentally observed rate has led to an insight into possible inaccuracies in data available for this system. In particular, it has pointed to the possibility that the curvature of the free energy surface (for the a phase) being overestimated by ThermoCalc. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.