Determination of Interfacial Energy for Solid-State Precipitation

Precipitation of strengthening phases from solid state is a critical process for many materials. For example, the high-temperature creep resistance of Ni-based superalloys is governed by ’ precipitates. However, the interfacial energy which controls the precipitation is expensive to determine experimentally. For simulations, the atomic nature of precipitation events necessitates using Molecular Dynamics (MD) so relying on fitting to a-priori experimental behavior is not required. However, the solid-state precipitation takes orders of magnitude longer time than is accessible for traditional MD simulation. Taking inspiration from Kinetic Monte-Carlo (KMC) methods for simulating diffusion on a rigid lattice, we have developed a hybrid KMC-MD approach to enable simulation of solid-state precipitation (and determination of the interfacial energy). Implementing these methods in LAMMPS, we calculated the interfacial energy for the ’ precipitation out of a super-saturated  phase in Ni-based superalloys. The resulting interfacial energy value for the Ni-Al system is well within the accuracy of experimental values, demonstrating the capability of this method. Enabling the calculation of the interfacial energy without a-priori experimental knowledge of the precipitation unlocks a more efficient ICME-based approach for guiding annealing protocols in Ni-based superalloys and other solid-state precipitation systems.