Influence of natural convection on microstructure evolution during the initial solidification transient: comparison of phase-field modeling with in situ synchrotron X-ray monitoring data

The influence of natural convection on the evolution of the solid-liquid (s/l) interface during the initial transient of upward directional solidification was studied on Al-4 wt.% Cu alloy by coupling the two dimensional quantitative phase-field model with the Navier-Stokes equations. The simulations were compared with in situ and real-time synchrotron X-ray monitoring data. The origin of natural convection in experiment was the presence of a small unavoidable horizontal temperature gradient. Due to the stringent requirement on the phase-field interface width parameters, the simulated domain could not be chosen as large as the size of the experimental sample. As the calculated fluid flow strength would be weakened by using a smaller domain, a horizontal temperature gradient ten times larger than the estimated experimental value was applied in simulation to recover a fluid flow washing the s/l interface similarly to experiments. Direct comparison to experimental measurements demonstrated that the phase-field simulations with convection qualitatively reproduced the evolution of all the characteristic parameters measured in experiments. Based on these results, the effects of natural convection on the growth dynamics of the s/l interface during directional solidification of alloy were further clarified.