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Studies Of Maximum Supercooling And Stirring In Levitated Liquid Metallic Alloys, Mark Edward Sellers

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nucleation—or the formation of some cluster in a medium undergoing a phase transition—is usually the initial step in a phase transition. However, this process is still not fully understood, as outstanding questions related to the role of structure, local order, and diffusion remain unanswered. Systematic supercooling studies on metallic liquids performed using electrostatic and electromagnetic (ESL and EML, respectively) will be presented and discussed within the context of several nucleation theories, such as the Classical Nucleation Theory, Diffuse Interface Theory, and Coupled-Flux theory. To study the role of diffusion on nucleation, studies on the International Space Station using the on-board …