Reactive diffusion in the Ti–Si system and the significance of the parabolic growth constant

Abstract

Solid diffusion couple experiments are conducted to analyse the growth mechanism of the phases and the diffusion mechanism of the components in the Ti–Si system. The calculation of the parabolic growth constants and the integrated diffusion coefficients substantiates that the analysis is intrinsically prone to erroneous conclusions if it is based on just the parabolic growth constants determined for a multiphase interdiffusion zone. The location of the marker plane is detected based on the uniform grain morphology in the TiSi₂ phase, which indicates that this phase grows mainly because of Si diffusion. The growth mechanism of the phases and morphological evolution in the interdiffusion zone are explained with the help of imaginary diffusion couples. The activation enthalpies for the integrated diffusion coefficient of TiSi₂ and the Si tracer diffusion are calculated as 190 ± 9 and 197 ± 8 kJ/mol, respectively. The crystal structure, details on the nearest neighbours of the components, and their relative mobilities indicate that the vacancies are mainly present on the Si sublattice.

Keywords:

• diffusion
• defects
• silicides
• growth mechanism
• Ti–Si system

Acknowledgement

Aloke Paul would like to acknowledge financial support from the AvH foundation for his stay in Germany, which helped in developing collaboration and in writing this manuscript with Sergiy Divinski.