Undercooling and Nucleation during Solidification.

Abstract

Undercooling of liquids is a common occurrence in solidification. The level of undercooling influences both the microstructural development by controlling phase selection during nucleation and the morphological evolution during the growth phase of solidification. The development of large liquid undercooling is linked to kinetic control of solidification processes including suppression of heterogeneous nucleation during slow cooling and constrained growth during rapid quenching. The deepest undercoolings have been measured in droplet samples and approach 0.3-0.4·Tm. At high undercooling, solidification can yield metastable product structures, whose constituents are the result of kinetic competition which usually is determined during the nucleation phase and controlled by heterogeneous nucleation. Recently, theoretical, experimental and simulation advances have led to a better understanding of nucleation catalysis reactions and the influence of thermal history during processing at high and low undercoolings. Detailed analysis of the kinetic competition process during solidification along with novel experiments have probed the limits of nucleation theory in both size and time scales and have stimulated new developments in theoretical modeling and computer simulation studies.