Reconstruction of dendritic growth by fast tomography and phase field filtering

Three dimensional models of dendritic structures during solidification are valuable for building physical models, validating simulated results, estimating some properties such as permeability in the mushy, simulating semisolid deformation and so on. Thus, it is of interest to observe microstructure evolution in situ. Time-resolved tomography combined with X-ray diffraction has allowed us to observe the evolution of dendritic structures and to measure crystallographic orientation in situ. Reconstruction still proves to be difficult for some alloy systems because of the tradeoff between time and spatial resolution. This paper demonstrates the reconstruction of dendritic structures for three different alloy systems (Al-10mass%Cu alloy with a diameter of 4 mm, CrMnFeCoNi alloy with 1 mm, and Zn-4mass%Al alloy with 0.7 mm). The observations were performed in a synchrotron radiation facility SPring-8. A filter using a phase field model was introduced to reconstruct the three-dimensional images. Parameters used in the filtering were consistently determined based on the raw reconstruction images. Evaluation of solid-liquid interface area and curvature was significantly improved by the filter. For the Al-Cu alloy, a three-dimensional model containing approximately 300 million voxels was obtained. For the CrMnFeCoNi alloys, the preferred growth direction <100> was confirmed by tomography and X-ray diffraction. For the Zn-Al alloy, the observed 14 growth directions were not simply defined by the crystallographic orientations, although the directions were consistent with the hexagonal symmetry. This study verifies that time resolved tomography, X-ray diffraction and the filter using a phase field model provide three dimensional models for light metal alloys with rather large diameters and 3d transition-metal alloys with rather large X-ray absorption coefficients. The models are expected to be used for further studies.