Phase Field Study of Microstructure Evolution in Eutectoid Phase Transformation – I Nucleation

Eutectoid growth, as the important reaction mechanism of the carbon steel heat treatment, is the basis to control the microstructure and performance. At present, most studies have focused on lamellar growth, and did not consider the nucleation process. Mainly due to the nucleation theory is inconclusive, a lot of research can support their own theory in a certain range. Based on the existing nucleation theory, this paper proposes a cooperative nucleation model to simulate the nucleation process of eutectoid growth. In order to ensure that the nucleation process is more suitable to the theoretical results, different correction methods were used to amend the model respectively. The results of numerical simulation show that when the model is unmodified, the lateral growth of single phase is faster than that of longitudinal growth, so the morphology is oval. Then, the effects of diffusion correction, mobility correction and ledges nucleation mechanism correction on the morphology of nucleation and the nucleation rate were studied respectively. It was found that the introduction of boundary diffusion and the nucleation mechanism of the ledges could lead to a more realistic pearlite.