Remarkable solute trapping within rapidly growing dendrites

Solute microsegregation always takes place during dendritic crystal growth. Although this may be reduced with the increase of crystal growth velocity, the realization of segregationless dendritic growth is quite difficult. Here the authors present the results of remarkable solute trapping within the rapidly growing dendrites of highly undercooled liquid Ni-5 wt %Si alloy. The dendrites grow at a velocity of 15 ms at the maximum experimental undercooling of 304 K. Such a high growth velocity results in the pronounced solute trapping and almost segregationless solidification. Furthermore, a model is proposed to describe the correlation between dendritic growth velocity and undercooling. It agrees well with the experimental results in the whole undercooling regime and provides a reasonable prediction for the dendritic growth trend under extremely great undercooling conditions.