Progress report on DOE research project [Thermodynamic and kinetic behavior of systems with intermetallic and intermediate phases]

A theoretical investigation was made of the coherent displacive phase transformation between two equilibrium single-phase states producing several orientation variants of the product phase. The research was focused on a behavior of coherent systems (martensitic systems, metal and ceramic, and ferroelectric systems) with defects. The computer simulation demonstrated that randomly distributed static defects may drastically affect the thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphology of the transformation. In particular, the interaction of the transformation mode with the defects may be responsible for appearance of two new fields in the phase diagram: (i) the two-phase field describing the tweed microstructure, which consists of the retain parent phase and the variants of the product phase and (ii) the single-phase field describing the tweed microstructure, which consists of the variants of the product phase. These new fields can be attributed to the pre-transitional states observed in some of th e displacive transformations. The microstructure evolution resulting in formation of the thermoelastic equilibrium is path dependent. This unusual behavior is expected in systems with a sharp dependence of the transition temperature on the defect concentration