Importance of Interfacial Energy in Precipitation Modeling Using Computational Thermodynamics Techniques

Several industrial alloy systems benefit from or try to avoid the precipitation of second phases. With computational thermodynamics techniques, both the bulk thermodynamics and the diffusion issues are currently well modeled for many systems. Recently, the classical models for nucleation and growth have been coupled with CALPHAD tools creating powerful models, which are very effective in many precipitation calculations. However, classical nucleation and growth models consider interfacial energies and these are not well known in many cases. In this work, calculations in industrial systems- mostly steels- are presented highlighting the importance of this variable on the modeling results and some of the current limitations related to the accessibility to the values of this parameter and its temperature dependence. Some reasons for these difficulties are discussed and possible avenues to solve this problem are brought to discussion.