Grain refinement induced by a critical crystal growth velocity in undercooled melts

Containerless undercooling by electromagnetic levitation has been used to measure both growth velocity and grain size as a function of undercooling in Cu70Ni30 and Cu69Ni30B1 alloys. At a critical undercooling ΔT* the temperature dependence of the growth velocity changes discontinuously. This is accompanied by a sudden drop of grain size in the solidified product by more than two orders of magnitude. The comparative investigations show that it is not a critical undercooling that initiates the grain refinement process, but rather a critical crystal growth velocity, which approximately equals the diffusive speed.