A full-field approach for precipitation in metallic alloys. Comparison with a mean-field model

Modeling precipitation in metallic alloys is a topic of great importance in physical metallurgy as the resulting strengthening strongly depends on the precipitate microstructure. We propose here a numerical full-field model for precipitation that describes precipitates with shape functions, thereby allowing to bridge scales between phase-field approaches- that accurately describe the precipitate evolution but require a fine discretization grid- and mean-field approaches- that are computationally very efficient but rely on strong assumptions. Our results demonstrate the capability of the full-field approach to model the different stages of precipitation during isothermal treatments. The comparison with mean-field results allow to discuss the influence of solutal impingement and precipitate coagulations on the evolution of the precipitate microstructure.