Multiphase Field Modeling Chemical Vapor Infiltration of SiC/SiC Composite

A novel multiphase field model is formulated to describe the complex microstructure evolution during Chemical Vapor Infiltration(CVI), which is one of the important method to produce the SiC matrix composites reinforced by SiC fibers in ceramic engineer. The model is composed of a set of nonlinear partial differential equations by coupling Ginzburg-Landau type phase field equations with mass balance equation. Mathematically, the codeposition of SiC, Si and C during CVI process is a typical free boundary problem. When this problem is handled by multiphase field method, it's greatly facilitated because of the implicitly boundary-tracking technique by phase field order parameters. This typical multiphysic field problem is solved by finite element software COMSOL. The numerical results show good agreement with experimental research. (© 2011 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)