Rahma Guérin | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

Growth patterns in a channel for singular surface energy: phase-field model.

We study solidification in a two-dimensional channel for faceted materials whose facets correspond to cusps in the gamma plot. The main result is the existence of three growth modes, according to the anisotropy strength: a single faceted finger at high anisotropies, two faceted fingers in the intermediate range, and an oscillating mode at low anisotropies. Simple geometrical and dynamical models are proposed to explain the nature of the observed modes. In particular, the one-finger patterns are shown to be similar to free dendrites while the two-finger patterns correspond to confined solidification fingers.

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PubMed2003

Phase-field approach for faceted solidification.

We extend the phase-field approach to model the solidification of faceted materials. Our approach consists of using an approximate gamma plot with rounded cusps that can approach arbitrarily closely the true gamma plot with sharp cusps that correspond to faceted orientations. The phase-field equations are solved in the thin-interface limit with local equilibrium at the solid-liquid interface [A. Karma and W.-J. Rappel, Phys. Rev. E 53, R3017 (1996)]. The convergence of our approach is first demonstrated for equilibrium shapes. The growth of faceted needle crystals in an undercooled melt is then studied as a function of undercooling and the cusp amplitude delta for a gamma plot of the form gamma=gamma0[1+delta(/sin theta/+/cos theta/)]. The phase-field results are consistent with the scaling law Lambda approximately V(-1/2) observed experimentally, where Lambda is the facet length and V is the growth rate. In addition, the variation of V and Lambda with delta is found to be reasonably well predicted by an approximate sharp-interface analytical theory that includes capillary effects and assumes circular and parabolic forms for the front and trailing rough parts of the needle crystal, respectively.

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