Coarsening of ordered intermetallic precipitates with coherency stress

The morphological evolution and coarsening kinetics of ordered intermetallic precipitates with coherency stress were studied using a diffuse-interface phase-field model in two dimensions (2D). The emphasis is on the effects of precipitate volume fraction. The average aspect ratio of the precipitates in the microstructure is found to increase with time and decrease with volume fraction. Contrary to all the existing coarsening theories but consistent with a number of experimental measurements on the coarsening kinetics of ordered gamma' precipitates in Ni-base superalloys, we found that the coarsening rate constant from the cubic growth law decreases as a function of volume fraction for small volume fractions (less than or similar to20%) and is constant for intermediate volume fractions (20-50%). From the simulation results, we infer that the two length scales in a stress-dominated coherent two-phase microstructure, the average precipitate size and average spacing between arrays of aligned precipitates, follow different growth exponents. It is demonstrated that as the volume fraction increases, the precipitate size distributions become broader and their skewness become increasingly positive. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of Acta Materialia Inc.