Quantification of Primary Dendritic and Secondary Eutectic Nucleation Undercoolings in Rapidly Solidified Hypo-Eutectic Al-Cu Droplets

This paper reports on the quantification of primary dendritic and secondary eutectic nucleation undercoolings during rapid solidification of impulse atomized hypo-eutectic Al-Cu droplets. The procedure consists in determining the eutectic fraction of each investigated droplet from the fraction of intermetallic Al2Cu obtained by Rietveld refinement analysis of neutrons scattering data. The corresponding eutectic nucleation undercooling is then deduced from the metastable phase diagram of the alloy. The primary dendritic nucleation undercooling is subsequently determined using semi-empirical coarsening models of secondary dendrite arms. The two nucleation undercoolings are finally used as input variables to run a microsegregation model for binary alloys. The fractions of eutectic computed by the microsegregation model compare very favorably with the experimental results.