Kinetics of interfacial reaction between solid iron and molten aluminium

Interfacial reaction in the Al-Fe system has been widely studied due to its technical and scientific importance and also practical implications in many manufacturing processes including aluminizing, permanent mold casting and solidification, and bi-metals fabrication. The introduction of advanced composite materials and particularly composites with intermetallic constituents has increased the importance of such reaction even further. In order to study the interfacial reaction between liquid aluminum and solid iron, tests have been carried out in both static and dynamic conditions, where for the static test, an iron coupon was simply immersed into a stationary molten aluminum bath, as for example in the work reported by Komatsu et al. or Bouche et al. For dynamic tests, however, iron discs were rotated within the molten aluminum. In both cases, the formation of a very thin layer of intermetallic compounds was reported at the beginning of each test, but the subsequent growth of such newly formed interface layer was found to be different.