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Published September 2011 | public
Journal Article

A weak compatibility condition for precipitation with application to the microstructure of PbTe–Sb_2Te_3 thermoelectrics

Abstract

We propose a weak condition of compatibility between phases applicable to cases exhibiting full or partial coherence and Widmanstätten microstructure. The condition is applied to the study of Sb_2Te_3 precipitates in a PbTe matrix in a thermoelectric alloy. The weak condition of compatibility predicts elongated precipitates lying on a cone determined by a transformation stretch tensor. Comparison of this cone with the long directions of precipitates determined by a slice-and-view method of scanning electron microscopy combined with focused ion beam sectioning shows good agreement between theory and experiment. A further study of the morphology of precipitates by the Eshelby method suggests that interfacial energy also plays a role and gives an approximate value of interfacial energy per unit area of 250 dyn cm^(−1).

Additional Information

© 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Received 18 January 2011; received in revised form 16 June 2011; accepted 17 June 2011. Available online 15 July 2011. The authors thank Wim Tirry for valuable discussions on the interpretation of the experimental data on the organization of the precipitates in the matrix, and Liping Liu and Jiangyu Li for discussions on the theory. The work of X.C., V.S., G.J.S. and R.D.J. was supported by AROMURI W911NF-07-1-0410. The work of S.C. and D.S. was supported by the Flemish FWO project G.0576.09 3D: characterization of precipitates in Ni–Ti SMA by Slice-and-View in a FIB-SEM dual-beam microscope. The work of T.I. was supported by the PRESTO program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency. R.D.J. also acknowledges support of AFOSR (GameChanger, GRT00008581/RF60012388) and National Science Foundation under the PIRE Grant No. OISE-0967140.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023