Overview of Presentation

• Historical Perspective
• Dendritic Growth
• The CET
• Conclusions

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 Historical Perspective

The work of Robert Mallet, FRS, MRIA

(1810-1881)

Mallet’s home
“Delville”
Glasnevin, Dublin.

Dean Swift had earlier written

Gulliver’s Travels here

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The Crimean War, 1854-1856

Into the jaws of Death

Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred
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Ordnance Problems
Fracture of cast iron canon in
service

Reported in :
“On the physical conditions
involved in the construction of
artillery”
Robert Mallet,
Longman, Brown, Green,
Longmans and Roberts,
London, 1856

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 The grain structure of fractured castings
“…the principal axes of the crystals
will always be found arranged in
lines perpendicular to the bounding
planes of the mass; that is to say, in
the lines of direction in which the
wave of heat has passed outwards
from the mass in the act of
consolidation…”

Mallet found that the castings often

broke along the planes of weakness
indicated by V-V.
Mallet’s photomacrograph
Robert Mallet, 1856

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Not all castings suffered...

There are no such planes of

weakness in these castings

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…but the large cast iron guns did...
Section of large cast-iron gun - part
of the breech through the “vent-
field”, perpendicular to the axis
of the bore. In this it
is…”shown…the directions of
crystalline aggregation, and the
planes of weakness resulting
from it.”

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 Mallet remarked...
…that in cast iron artillery
“every abrupt change in the form of the exterior of the gun or mortar is
attended with equal sudden changes in the arrangement of the crystals
of the metal, and every such change is accompanied by one or more
planes of weakness in the mass.

…we have the folly still to cling to making numerous and useless sharp
angles and corners, and sudden changes of form and of dimension on
the exterior of all our ordnance, and so prolong in the most needless
way one cause of their weakness.

That gun, however plain externally,will look best to the really educated
eye, that most fully confirms the laws upon which its perfection as an
instrument lies.”

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 Mallet’s “Laws” paraphrased
• The development of the crystals depend upon the rate at which the
mass of the casting has cooled. Those castings in which the fluid iron
is cast into a nearly cold and very thick mould of cast iron, whose high
conducting power rapidly carries off the heat, present the most
complete and perfect development of the crystalline structure
perpendicular to the chilled surface of the casting {columnar
structure}.
• The larger the casting the “coarser the grain”, that is the larger are the
crystals that develop themselves into the mass.
• For a given mass of casting, the size of crystals depends upon (a) the
pouring temperature and (b) the cooling rate.

Mallet advocates a low pour temperature and rapid cooling to achieve

small crystals and alleviate the problems of “planes of weakness”, and
to achieve a high “specific gravity” of the casting.

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 Final comments from 1856
“The very lowest temperature at which the iron remains liquid enough
fully to fill every cavity of the mould, without risk of defect, is that
which a large casting, such as a heavy gun, ought to be poured”

These studies provide an early hint to the importance of G and V in the

development of structure in castings.

G is the thermal gradient into the liquid.

V is the velocity of the advancing solid.

The development of the modern understanding of the CET came from

subsequent theories of dendritic growth.

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 Comment from 1997

I love those little dendrites

Dendrites are what I love to see
They way they branch their little arms
Depending on both V and G

Jo Ann Clark
PhD candidate
University of Waterloo
Canada

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 Dendritic Growth
Theories of dendritic growth invariably start via a summation of the
contributions to undercooling (DT) at the dendrite tip.

Growth will be limited by

• kinetics of atom attachment to interface
• capillarity
• diffusion of heat ☺
• diffusion of mass (solute)

☺ depends upon G :
columnar growth : G+
equiaxed growth : G-

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 Undercooling (TL-Tdendrite tip)
DT determines the driving force for
dendritic growth. Lipton, Glicksmann
and Kurz (1987) -
DT = DTT+ DTK+ DTR+ DTC equiaxed growth

subscripts : T - thermal
K - kinetic
R - curvature
C - constitutional or solutal

columnar : DTT = 0
dendritic : DTK ~ 0
pure metal : DTC = 0
large R : DTR ~ 0

For alloys DTC usually dominates

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 Equiaxed grains - origin
Grow from nuclei within the bulk liquid.

Origin - theories
- constitutional supercooling
- big bang
- dendrite arm remelting
- crystals from free surface
- grain refiners
(Winegard and Chalmers, 1954)
(Chalmers, 1963)
(Jackson, Hunt et al., 1966)
(Southin, 1967)

presented evidence against his earlier theory of constitutional

supercooling in the centre of a casting activating grain refiners. The
“big bang” theory arose out of observations of the effect of pour
superheat on the grain structure of Al-Cu alloys - observations not
dissimilar to those earlier ones of Mallet (1856).

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 Origin of equiaxed
grains – contd.

B. Chalmers,
“The structure of ingots”
The Journal of the Australian Institute of
Metals, 8(3), 255-263, 1963

Full line: temperature

Dotted line: local liquidus

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Origin of equiaxed
grains – contd.
Fragmentation of
growing columnar
dendrites

Equiaxed crystal shower

from free (top) surface

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