CALPHAD modeling of metastable phases and ternary compounds in Ti-Al-N system

The development and evaluation of thermodynamic databases for the Ti-Al-N system is important for a wide range of engineering alloys. In this work, we resorted to the integration of ab initio thermodynamics, experiments and CALPHAD modeling for a comprehensive understanding of the metastable and the ternary phases in Ti-Al-N system. The supersaturated solutions of (Ti,Al)N with both rocksalt and wurtzite structures were well described by using the sub-regular solution model. Thereby, the formation, the phase separation and the meta-solubility of TiAlN coatings were successfully elaborated by the metastable pseudo-binary TiN-AlN section and the PVD (physical vapor deposition) phase diagram. Moreover, a number of isothermal and isopleth sections were also calculated and compared with available experiments and previous thermodynamic assessments. For the first time the ternary compound of τ3 was corrected as Ti4AlN3 in our proposed database.