Numerical simulation for β/α transformation of Ti–6Al–4V alloy using a lattice Boltzmann - Cellular automata method

This paper considers the beta/alpha transformation of Ti–6Al–4V alloy using a lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) – cellular automata (CA) coupled method in terms of microstructural evolution during phase transformation. Particularly, the effects of the cooling rate on microstructures such as beta grain size, alpha colony size, and alpha lath thickness were examined as well as the overall morphologies. The LBM and CA were used to implement the diffusion of alloy components and phase transformation, respectively. Additionally, the thermodynamic and kinetic data for simulating the ternary alloy system were obtained from CALPHAD software to utilize the equilibrium phase diagram calculations. The initial states of the beta grain and its composition fields affect the processing of beta/alpha phase transformation and the final alpha + beta phase morphologies. Validation of the proposed method was conducted to compare the simulation results with experimental trends for microstructures of Ti–6Al–4V from the literature. The error in prediction of microstructural morphologies were 20% in the average alpha thickness with deviation of up to 5 μm.