The average lamellar spacing and interface undercooling in steady-state irregular eutectic growth were estimated based on the Jackson and Hunt’s analysis by relaxing the isothermal interface assumption.At low growth rates,the average lamellar spacing and average interface undercooling are dependent only on the characteristic thermo-physical properties of a binary eutectic system. For a general Al-Si eutectic,it is found that the eutectic characteristic length based on the present non-isothermal analysis is consistent with that obtained from isothermal analysis;however,the average interface undercooling is remarkably different between them,and such discrepancy in average interface undercooling increases with increasing of growth rate.The measured interface undercooling obtained from literature is reasonably interpreted by present non-isothermal analysis.
This paper reports on laser surface remelting experiments performed on a Zn-2wt.%Cu hypoperitectic alloy by employing a 5kW CW CO2 laser at scanning velocities between 6 and 1207mm/s. The growth velocities of the mi- crostructures in the laser molten pool were accurately measured. The planar interface structure caused by the high velocity absolute stability was achieved at a growth velocity of 210 mm/s. An implicit expression of the critical solidification velocity for the cellular-planar transition was carried out by nonlinear stability analyses of the planar interface. The results showed a better agreement with the measured critical velocity than that predicted by M-S theory. Cell-free structures were observed throughout the whole molten pool at a scanning velocity of 652 mm/s and the calculated minimum temperature gradient in this molten pool was very close to the critical temperature gradient for high gradient absolute stability (HGAS) of the η phase. This indicates that HGAS was successfully achieved in the present experiments.