Inverse Ripening and Rearrangement of Precipitates under Chemomechanical Coupling.

A coupling between diffusional and mechanical relaxation raised from composition-dependent elastic constants, and its effects on the evolution of precipitates with finite misfit strain are investigated. Inverse ripening has been observed where smaller precipitate grows at the expense of a larger one. This occurs due to fluxes generated under elastically-strained solute gradients around precipitates that scales with R r 6 where R and r are the precipitate radius and the radial coordinate, respectively. Both isotropic and anisotropic dependency of elastic constants on the composition were considered. The latter leads to the emergence of new patterns of elastic anisotropy and rearrangement of precipitates in the matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]