VisiMat^©–Educational Tool for Multicomponent Diffusion in 2 and 3 Dimensions

Abstract

Finding Fick's second law solution for linear diffusion cases is a difficult task when applying to multicomponent systems. Most of the mathematical aspects can be eased by employing software that handles the laborious linear algebra steps. Morral and Thompson [1,2] developed a well thought methodology for one-dimensional, single-phase, multicomponent diffusion solutions. The method is known as the "Square-Root Diffusivity Method." Implementing this approach for ternary alloys was made convenient through Profiler  , developed by Morral and co-workers [3,4, 5,6]. Here we present VisiMat © , a 2-and 3-d educational code based on the MatLab  computing platform. The new code combines original features available in Profiler  as well as those added by Glicksman and Lupulescu [7] and Lupulescu et al. [8,9] to evaluate single phase ternary alloys and to study the kinetics of zero-flux planes (ZFPs). Although VisiMat © [10] could handle numerically any number of components, the 3-d visualizations are not possible for more than four components.