Experimental Studies of the Interaction Between a Parallel Shear Flow and a Directionally-Solidifying Front

It has long been recognized that flow in the melt can have a profound influence on the dynamics of a solidifying interface and hence the quality of the solid material. In particular, flow affects the heat and mass transfer, and causes spatial and temporal variations in the flow and melt composition. This results in a crystal with nonuniform physical properties. Flow can be generated by buoyancy, expansion or contraction upon phase change, and thermo-soluto capillary effects. In general, these flows can not be avoided and can have an adverse effect on the stability of the crystal structures. This motivates crystal growth experiments in a microgravity environment, where buoyancy-driven convection is significantly suppressed. However, transient accelerations (g-jitter) caused by the acceleration of the spacecraft can affect the melt, while convection generated from the effects other than buoyancy remain important. Rather than bemoan the presence of convection as a source of interfacial instability, Hurle in the 1960s suggested that flow in the melt, either forced or natural convection, might be used to stabilize the interface. Delves considered the imposition of both a parabolic velocity profile and a Blasius boundary layer flow over the interface. He concluded that fast stirring could stabilize the interface to perturbations whose wave vector is in the direction of the fluid velocity. Forth and Wheeler considered the effect of the asymptotic suction boundary layer profile. They showed that the effect of the shear flow was to generate travelling waves parallel to the flow with a speed proportional to the Reynolds number. There have been few quantitative, experimental works reporting on the coupling effect of fluid flow and morphological instabilities. Huang studied plane Couette flow over cells and dendrites. It was found that this flow could greatly enhance the planar stability and even induce the cell-planar transition. A rotating impeller was buried inside the sample cell, driven by an outside rotating magnet, in order to generate the flow. However, it appears that this was not a well-controlled flow and may also have been unsteady. In the present experimental study, we want to study how a forced parallel shear flow in a Hele-Shaw cell interacts with the directionally solidifying crystal interface. The comparison of experimental data show that the parallel shear flow in a Hele-Shaw cell has a strong stabilizing effect on the planar interface by damping the existing initial perturbations. The flow also shows a stabilizing effect on the cellular interface by slightly reducing the exponential growth rate of cells. The left-right symmetry of cells is broken by the flow with cells tilting toward the incoming flow direction. The tilting angle increases with the velocity ratio. The experimental results are explained through the parallel flow effect on lateral solute transport. The phenomenon of cells tilting against the flow is consistent with the numerical result of Dantzig and Chao.