Interactions between grain boundary and compositional domain boundary during spinodal decomposition in nanocrystalline alloys

Abstract

Due to the large grain boundary (GB) volume fraction in nanocrystalline materials, interactions between GB and compositional domain boundary (CDB) play an important role in determining the nanoscale-modulated domain structures during spinodal decomposition. In the present paper, the phase field crystal model is employed to investigate the interactions between GB and CDB. Simulation results show that CDB coarsening can drive the GB migration and bring the impingement of particles with different orientations; the large volume fraction of GB can increase the dislocation volume fraction in CDBs but does not change its proportion in the whole defects number; the crossover point of the coarsening dynamic comes from the block effect of GB with large volume fraction.

Keywords:

• spinodal decomposition
• nanocrystalline alloys
• grain boundary
• compositional domain boundary
• phase field crystal method

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by National Natural Science foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51071128, 51101125), National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB610401), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 20110491689), Free Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing (67-QP-2011, SKLSP201002).