Modeling of solidification microstructures based on fully coupling of macro-transport phenomena with cellular automata

This paper has attempted to simulate the microstructure formation based on fully coupling of temperature field, concentration field and velocity field with micro-kinetics. The authors presented a new way, which is the combina tion of FDM and cellular automata (CAFD) to visualize the microstructure fo rmation of the thin complex superalloy turbine blades cast by the vacuum in vestment process. The distribution, orientation and mechanism of the hetero geneous nucleation, the growth kinetics of dendrites and the columnar to eq uiaxed transition (CET) are considered. Capitalizing on these simulating sc hemes, the comprehensive influence of key process variables on the scale an d uniformity of grains has been investigated quantitatively. The simulated grain size and morphology agree well with the experimental results.