Faceted and dendritic morphology change in alloy solidification

Abstract

We present methods and results for the simulation of faceted and dendritic crystal growth. Using a thermodynamically realistic isothermal alloy model for AlSi we demonstrate, in confirmation of experimental observations, a change in morphology from perfectly faceted hexagons at smaller undercooling to dendritic growth at larger undercoolings. We also demonstrate that there exists a cut off temperature which separates the two distinct morphologies, and indeed hybrid morphologies. These results suggest that the mechanism for morphology variation observed experimentally primarily lies in anisotropic surface free energy modelling, which we adopt in preference to kinetic anisotropy.