A model is developed based on the time-related thermal diffusion equations to investigate the effects of twodimensional shear flow on the stability of a crystal interface in the supercooled melt of a pure substance. Similar to the three-dimensional shear flow as described in our previous paper, the two-dimensional shear flow can also be found to reduce the growth rate of perturbation amplitude. However, compared with the case of the Laplace equation for a steady-state thermal diffusion field, due to the existence of time partial derivatives of the temperature fields in the diffusion equation the absolute value of the gradients of the temperature fields increases, therefore destabilizing the interface. The circular interface is more unstable than in the case of Laplace equation without time partial derivatives. The critical stability radius of the crystal interface increases with shearing rate increasing. The stability effect of shear flow decreases remarkably with the increase of melt undercooling.
The solutions of temperature and solute fields around a spherical crystal growing from a binary melt under the far-field flow are obtained.Based on the results,a linear stability analysis on the spherical interface growing from the binary melt under the far-field flow is performed.It is found that the constitutional supercooling effect ahead of the spherical crystal interface under the far-field flow is enhanced compared with that without the flow.The growth rate of the perturbation amplitude at the up-wind side of the spherical crystal interface is larger than that at the down-wind side.The critical stability radius of the crystal interface decreases with the increasing far-field flow velocity.Under the far-field flow,the whole spherical interface becomes more unstable compared with that without the flow.
The morphological stability of a planar interface with different crystallographic orientations is studied under a small positive temperature gradient using a transparent model alloy of succinonitrile. Novel experimental apparatus is constructed to provide a temperature gradient of about 0.37 K/mm. Under this small temperature gradient, the planar interface instability depends largely on the crystallographic orientation. It is shown experimentally that the effect of interfacial energy anisotropy on planar interface stability cannot be neglected even in a small temperature gradient system. Higher interfacial energy anisotropy leads the planar interface to become more unstable, which is different from the stabilizing effect of the interfacial energy on the planar interface. The experimental results are in agreement with previous theoretical calculations and phase field simulations.
The heterogeneous nucleation behaviors of NHaCI crystal on a rough chilling surface of aluminum immerged in NHaCI-H20 solution were experimentally analyzed and the relationship between the surface roughness and the nucleation site selection behaviors on polished aluminum substrate was investigated, and it was discovered that the number of nucleation sites decreases significantly with decreasing the roughness of the polished substrate. Further nucleation experiments were carried out on chemically etched aluminum substrate with regular micro- morphology on its surface. It has been shown that both the micro-morphology and the wettability vary with the substrate surface prepared by different etching process. The prepared surface with step-like structures has a strong wettability with NH4CI-70 wt% H20 solution and the nucleation density of NH4CI on the its surfaces is significantly higher than that of the reference surfaces, which shows that the geometrical morphology features have important effects on both the wettability and the nucleation behaviors.
