Modelling of particle nucleation and growth in binary alloys under elastic deformation: An application to a Cu–0.95 wt%Co alloy

This study incorporates the effect of elastic deformation in a previously proposed model for the nucleation and growth of precipitates. We adapt the KWN-model by Robson [20] to incorporate the effect of strain energy arising from elastic deformation on the homogeneous nucleation and growth of Co particles in a Cu–Co system at constant temperatures. The finite-volume method is used for the KWN-model and the finite-element method is used to simulate elastic deformations within a cylindrical tension test specimen. Simulations of the nucleation and growth of Co particles in a Cu–Co system on the cylindrical region show that the incorporation of elastic strain energies has a noticeable impact on the process. The derived quantities of homogeneous nucleation and growth, such as the particle volume fraction and the particle number density, show a clear spatial correlation with the calculated strain energy. The results also show that the currently presented algorithm, which incorporates the influence of elastic deformation, has low computational cost with respect to full simulations, with just a minimal loss of accuracy.