Experimental investigation and thermodynamic re-assessment of the ternary copper-nickel-lead system

In the present work, an isothermal equilibration technique was used to measure the mutual solubilities of liquid lead and solid CuNi foil in the temperature range 1280-1530 K. The samples were equilibrated and an Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer (ICP-AES) and an Electron Probe Micro Analyzer (EPMA) were used to quantify the chemical composition of the phases. Selected solubility data obtained in this work were combined with the literature data to obtain a thermodynamic description of the Cu-Ni-Pb ternary liquid and fcc solid solution phases by applying the CALPHAD method. The ternary assessment agrees well with the experimental observations in this work.