Experimental and Numerical Investigation on the Phase Separation Affected by Cooling Rates and Marangoni Convection in Cu-Cr Alloys

Abstract

In this work, we study the microstructures upon rapid solidification from the melt which occurs in Cu-Cr electrical contacts after switching operations. As the local cooling rates are difficult to be determined experimentally, we numerically compute the mean radius of Cr-particles from phase separation as a function of the cooling rate by utilizing a convective Cahn–Hilliard model. Based on the computationally derived correlation and on the metallographically observed microstructure, we are able to extract back the local cooling rates during heat treatment. We further examine the effect of Marangoni convection on the phase separation structure in a particularly composed simulation study. We obtain the cooling rate for a given particle size affected by the solutal Marangoni convection.