Varying the spatial disorder of alloys with immiscible components

The microstructures of heterogeneous materials are intimately related to their bulk physical properties. As a result, the ability to control these microstructures to tune physical properties like conductivity or elastic moduli has many practical applications. Alloys with immiscible components can have microstructural characteristics that vary drastically depending on chemical composition as well as the process parameters under which they are manufactured. Here, we probe the relationship between the microstructural, elemental, and crystallographic features of multi-phase alloy systems and the parameters used to create them. In particular, we apply methods from statistical mechanics, including the volume fraction and field intensity variance, to microscopy data that describes the spatially-resolved elemental and crystallographic makeup of the alloys. We then examine how the disorder in these microstructures varies across length scales for different alloy production parameters. This work initiates a program to use statistical mechanical tools to inform the parameters used to manufacture industrially-relevant alloys with targeted microstructural characteristics.