Determination of activation energies for nucleation and growth from isothermal differential scanning calorimetry data

Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is usually adopted to analyze solid-state phase transformation incorporating nucleation, growth and impingement. Then, for isothermal transformation, time-dependent Avrami exponent and overall effective activation energy can always be deduced using recipes, which are derived from an analytical phase transformation model. On this basis, a concise and reliable approach to determine time-independent activation energies for nucleation and growth is proposed. Numerical calculations have demonstrated that the new approach is sufficiently precise under different conditions of transformation (e.g. nucleation: mixed nucleation and Avrami nucleation; growth: interface-controlled growth and diffusion-controlled growth; impingement: randomly nuclei dispersed, anisotropic growth and non-random nuclei distributions). Application of the approach in crystallization of Zr55Cu30Al10Ni5, Zr50Al10Ni40 and Cu46Zr45Al7Y2 bulk amorphous alloys as measured by isothermal DSC was performed.

► A recipe is proposed to determine activation energies for nucleation and growth. ► The recipe is more reliable and concise than commonly used methods. ► QN and QG for the crystallization of several amorphous alloys are obtained.