Identification and characterization of Cr-rich precipitates in FeCr alloys : An atomistic study

In this work, we present a simple and fast method in order to identify and to characterize solute-rich non-pure coherent precipitates in atomistic simulations. As an application of this method a thermal annealing of the binary FeCr alloy was performed using kinetic Monte Carlo techniques to study the phase separation process. The simulation was performed using two different cohesive models that predict a different mixing enthalpy to see the effect on the precipitation kinetics. The evolution of the precipitate number density and size distributions has been followed during thermal annealing of the Fe–11.8Cr at 673 K. The obtained results are discussed and compared with available experimental data.