In situ studies of mass transport in liquid alloys by means of neutron radiography.

When in situ techniques became available in recent years this led to a breakthrough in accurately determining diffusion coefficients for liquid alloys. Here we discuss how neutron radiography can be used to measure chemical diffusion in a ternary AlCuAg alloy. Neutron radiography hereby gives complementary information to x-ray radiography used for measuring chemical diffusion and to quasielastic neutron scattering used mainly for determining self-diffusion. A novel Al(2)O(3) based furnace that enables one to study diffusion processes by means of neutron radiography is discussed. A chemical diffusion coefficient of Ag against Al around the eutectic composition Al(68.6)Cu(13.8)Ag(17.6) at.% was obtained. It is demonstrated that the in situ technique of neutron radiography is a powerful means to study mass transport properties in situ in binary and ternary alloys that show poor x-ray contrast.

Note: X-ray radiography for measuring chemical diffusion in metallic melts.

A x-ray radioscopy technique for measuring in situ chemical diffusion coefficients in metallic melts is presented. The long-capillary diffusion measurement method is combined with imaging techniques using microfocus tubes and flat panel detectors in order to visualize and quantitatively analyze diffusive mixing of two melts of different chemical composition. The interdiffusion coefficient as function of temperature and time is obtained by applying Fick's diffusion laws. Tracking the time dependence of the mean square penetration depth of the mixing process allows to detect changes in the mass transport caused by convective flow. The possibility to sort out convective mass transport contributions from analysis enhances significantly the accuracy compared to the conventional long-capillary diffusion measurement method with postmortem analysis. The performance of this novel diffusion measurement method with x-ray radiography technique is demonstrated by a diffusion experiment in an Al-Ni melt.

Diffusion in Al-Cu melts studied by time-resolved X-ray radiography.

We use time-resolved x-ray radiography in order to monitor interdiffusion processes in situ in liquid alloys. We measure temperature and composition dependent interdiffusion coefficients (D{AlCu}) in Al-rich Al-Cu melts. At constant temperature, D{AlCu} only exhibits a weak dependence of the alloy composition. As compared to self-diffusion, interdiffusion is enhanced by a factor of about 3. Our results demonstrate that it is not possible to express interdiffusion in terms of self-diffusion and thermodynamic driving forces.