Quantitative calculations of thermal-expansion coefficient in Fe–Ni alloys: First-principles approach

Abstract

The thermal expansion coefficients (α) of Fe1-xNix alloys are calculated by means of the Debye-Grüneisen model, which uses the input parameters calculated from density functional theory (DFT) with collinear spin alignments. The various atomic configurations of fcc and bcc supercells with x being 0–0.5 are calculated to conduct the composition-specific analysis. Thermodynamic analysis is employed to facilitate the evaluation of α in bulk alloys, where the calculated supercells are used as the canonical ensemble. Such calculated α exhibits very similar composition-dependency in comparison with the experimental data from literature, particularly providing the well-known Invar effect at 65 wt% of Fe. The calculations also demonstrated that the pressure-derived magnetic frustration, i.e. the magneto-volume effect, is strongly correlated with the Invar effect. The present approach combining the Debye-Grüneisen formalism and the collinear DFT calculation is shown to be a comprehensive theoretical framework for analysis on the thermal expansion properties in metal alloys.