The Marangoni convection effects on directional dendritic solidification

The Pore Formation and Mobility Investigation (PFMI) experiments conducted on the International Space Station revealed that Marangoni convection caused by the presence of bubbles could affect the microstructure formation. The experiment provided information on the bubble movement and morphological evolution during remelting and directional solidification under microgravity condition for a succinonitrile (SCN)-water binary alloy. In this work, a three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann (LB)-Cellular automaton (CA) model was utilized to study the effects of Marangoni convection on the solidification microstructure. The results reveal that the induced convection is strong enough to bend dendrites from their preferential crystallographic direction and can affect the dendrite growth rate.