A study on the medium range order in molten Fe3Si and FeSi alloys

作者:Qin JY*; Gu TK; Bian XF
来源:Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter , 2004, 16(28): 4753-4760.
DOI:10.1088/0953-8984/16/28/001

摘要

Prepeaks are observed in the x-ray diffraction patterns of molten Fe3Si and FeSi alloys and the mechanism of their microstructures is discussed. The distance in real space corresponding to the prepeak positions resembles that of the Si-Si distances in the D0(3) type crystal of Fe3Si within a deviation of 2.4%. Furthermore, by the reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) simulation, the prepeak is only found in the partial structure S-SiSi (Q) for molten Fe-3 Si alloy, while in molten FeSi alloy prepeaks are found in both S-SiSi (Q) and S-FeFe (Q) with similar height. The Gaussian distribution is found in the partial coordination number distribution of Fe atoms around a Si atom in the two alloys. The dominant 7-coordination in molten FeSi alloy suggests that Fe7Si and FeSi7 type clusters are kept in the molten state from FeSi crystal. Si-Si coherent packing should be responsible for the medium range order (MRO) of molten Fe3Si while Fe-Fe and Si-Si coherent packing for that of molten FeSi.