An Energetic Study on the Preference of the Habit Plane in Fcc/bcc System

The preference of the habit planes (HPs) developed from precipitation in the fcc/bcc system has been investigated. The interfacial energy of different interface orientations has been examined with variation of the orientation relationships (OR) and lattice parameters by a classical molecular dynamics method. The results show that interface has the lowest interfacial energy when it contains parallel Burgers vectors and a set of dislocations. The local minimum of interfacial energy may not associated with a maximum of dislocation spacing. It is also found that the near Kurdjumov-Sachs OR is more preferable than the near Nishiyama-Wasserman OR. Contrary to the previous interfacial energy calculations, which usually limit to rational ORs, the present work allows ORs to be irrational, which agrees with the observations.