Anisotropic growth of multigrain in equiaxial solidification simulated with the phase field method

The phase field method has been mainly used to simulate the growth of a single crystal in the past. But polycrystalline materials predominate in engineering. In this work, a phase field model for multigrain solidification is developed, which takes into account the random crystallographic orientations of crystallites and preserves the rotational invariance of the free energy. The morphological evolution of equiaxial multigrain solidification is predicted and the effect of composition on transformation kinetics is studied. The numerical results indicate that due to the soft impingement of grains the Avrami exponent varies with the initial melt composition and the solidification fraction.