Simulation of dendritic growth for ternary alloys based on modified cellular automaton model

Abstract

Based on the binary cellular automaton method, a modified cellular automaton model for ternary alloys is developed to simulate dendrite growth controlled by solutal effects and microsegregation in the low Peclet number regime by coupling PanEngine, which is a multicomponent thermodynamic and equilibrium calculation engine. The model can be used to calculate the interfacial equilibrium composition by considering the influence of Gibbs-Thomson effect induced curvature undercooling, and multicomponents contributed constitutional undercooling. Meanwhile, the growth velocity of interface is determined by solving the solute conservation equation simultaneously with dimensionless solute supersaturation equation for each alloying element. Moreover, equilibrium liquidus temperature and equilibrium solid concentration at the interface are derived by PanEngine. Free dendrite growth of Al-7%Si-xMg ternary alloys is simulated by the present model, which shows that the increase of solute Mg can suppress the growths of both primary and secondary dendrite arms. Meanwhile, constrained columnar dendrite growth of Al-7%Si-0.5%Mg with the increases of pulling velocity and constant thermal gradient during directional solidification is calculated. The results reveal the competitive growth of columnar dendrites, and demonstrate that the primary dendrite arm spacing would decrease as the pulling velocity increases, which accords well with the Hunt model.