A review on precipitation kinetics

Kinetics of precipitation is of great interest to all materials scientists. In this nice overview, Deschamps and Hutchinson discuss all the aspects related to precipitation in metallic systems — experiments and modelling — and give some interesting pointers to future directions which might be fruitful to pursue. Strongly recommended!

Precipitation kinetics in metallic alloys: experiments and modelling
A.Deschamps, C.R.Hutchinson
Nanoscale precipitation is one of the most widely used microstructural tools to manipulate the properties of metallic alloys, and especially to reach high strength. Optimal microstructures are reached through complex solid state phase transformations involving non-isothermal heat treatments, metastable phases, complex chemistry, non-equilibrium vacancies, and interaction with structural defects. These phase transformations are controlled by an interplay between thermodynamics and kinetics, resulting through nucleation, growth and coarsening, in a large variety of precipitation trajectories that depend on both alloy chemistry and processing. Progress in both experimental characterization and modelling has tremendously improved the knowledge and description of these processes. The purpose of this overview is to describe the current level of understanding of precipitation kinetics, starting from the relatively simple situation of homogeneous precipitation of dilute coherent phases and including different levels of additional complexity regarding the diffusion mechanism, the effect of finite volume fraction, the effect of particle shape, the competitive multi-phase precipitation, the heterogeneous nucleation, and the non-isothermal effects.

Surveying and organising literature: a couple of pointers

Here is an YouTube video on building a database using excel for literature survey from Stephen McQuillium: https://youtu.be/Y40Wy1guAiQ

The lectures by Professor Phanikumar on literature search is a good starting point too! https://youtu.be/Yzfl3rtF0SM

Do it yourself: bio-printers

Here is an interesting paper from Applied Physics Reviews: for those of you who want to tinker and build things with your hands!

State-of-art affordable bioprinters: A guide for the DiY community, Carlos Ezio Garciamendez-Mijares, Prajwal Agrawal, Germán García Martínez, Ernesto Cervantes Juarez, and Yu Shrike Zhang

Applied Physics Reviews 8, 031312 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0047818

Physics based Machine Learning

Yuchu Wang, Bita Ghaffari, Christopher Taylor, Simon Lekakh, Mei Li, Yue Fan, Predicting the energetics and kinetics of Cr atoms in Fe-Ni-Cr alloys via physics-based machine learning, Scripta Materialia, Volume 205, 2021, 114177, ISSN 1359-6462.

An interesting read! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359646221004577

National Academies Press: a report of interest

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Data Analytics and What It Means to the Materials Community: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25628

While you are at it, this old report might also be of interest: National Research Council. 2014. Big Data in Materials Research and Development: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18760.