Phase-field modeling of the influence of elastic field on the nucleation and microstructure evolution in precipitation

A phase-field method was employed to study the influence of elastic field on the nucleation and microstructure evolution. Two kinds of nucleation process were considered: one using fixed nucleation probability and the other calculated from the classical nucleation theory. In the latter case, the simulated results show that the anisotropic elastic strain field yields significant effects on the behavior of nucleation. With a large lattice misfit between the matrixes and the precipitates, the nucleation process does not appear fully random but displays some spatial correlation and has a preference for the elastic soft direction. However, with a small lattice misfit, this bias does not look quite clear. On the contrary, in the case of fixed nucleation probability, the elastic field has no influence on the nucleation process. The lattice mismatch also exerts influences on the microstructure morphology: with lattice mismatch becoming larger, the microstructure proves to align along the elastic soft direction.