Plane-Front Solidification

Abstract

In Chapter 5 the importance of formulating solute mass balances during solidification was considered from the perspective of deriving the laws of chemical macrosegregation. Specifically, the Gulliver-Scheil equations were derived from an interfacial mass balance that ignored the influences of solute transport within the solid phase. In addition, it was also found convenient to impose the condition of ‘perfectly efficient’ convective mixing in the melt, an assumption that precludes the need to consider solute transport through the melt via atomic diffusion. Efficient mixing homogenizes the melt throughout the solidification process, keeping the residual melt concentration everywhere the same at each instant of time.