Phase-field crystal study for the characteristics and influence factors of grain boundary segregation in binary alloys

Grain boundary segregation strongly modifies grain boundary behaviors and affects the physical and mechanical properties of solid polycrystalline materials. In this paper, we study the grain boundary segregation characteristics and the variation law of grain boundary segregation with temperature, crystal misorientation angle, undercooling, lattice mismatch and the difference of interspecies bond energy and self-bond energy using the binary-alloy phase-field crystal model. The simulation results show that the solute atoms segregate into individual dislocation regions for the low-angle grain boundary while the solute atoms homogeneously segregate into the entire boundary for the high-angle grain boundary with nonzero initial concentration. The degree of segregation strongly increases when the temperature, the difference of interspecies bond energy and the self-bond energy decrease, and when misorientation and undercooling increase. Small lattice mismatches did not strongly affect segregation; however, the higher mismatch has obvious effects on segregation. Our simulation results agree well with theoretical and experimental results.