International audienceWe report on an experimental study of the effects of interphase boundary anisotropy on eutectic microstructures using a new methodology called rotating directional solidification (RDS), which consists of rotating a thin sample with respect to a fixed unidirectional thermal gradient. The systems used are thin, large eutectic grains of the CBr4-C2Cl6 and In-In2Bi lamellar eutectic alloys. The shape of the observed RDS lamellar trajectories turns out to be a reproducible eutectic-grain-dependent feature, in agreement with the theoretical prediction that these trajectories are approximately homothetic to the Wulff form of the interphase boundary in the sample plane. We show that different modes of lamellar growth, ranging from quasi-isotropic to (crystallographically) locked, exist in different eutectic grains of the two alloys studied. A detailed characterisation of these modes is given, with particular attention to the as-yet poorly understood aspects of locked lamellar growth. (C) 2012 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

In directional solidification of binary eutectics, it is often observed that two-phase lamellar growth patterns grow tilted with respect to the direction z of the imposed temperature gradient. This crystallographic effect depends on the orientation of the two crystal phases α and β with respect to z. Recently, an approximate theory was formulated that predicts the lamellar tilt angle as a function of the anisotropy of the free energy of the solid(α)-solid(β) interphase boundary. We use two different numerical methods-phase field (PF) and dynamic boundary integral (BI)-to simulate the growth of steady periodic patterns in two dimensions as a function of the angle θ(R) between z and a reference crystallographic axis for a fixed relative orientation of α and β crystals, that is, for a given anisotropy function (Wulff plot) of the interphase boundary. For Wulff plots without unstable interphase-boundary orientations, the two simulation methods are in excellent agreement with each other and confirm the general validity of the previously proposed theory. In addition, a crystallographic "locking" of the lamellae onto a facet plane is well reproduced in the simulations. When unstable orientations are present in the Wulff plot, it is expected that two distinct values of the tilt angle can appear for the same crystal orientation over a finite θ(R) range. This bistable behavior, which has been observed experimentally, is well reproduced by BI simulations but not by the PF model. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.