Geometrical model for martensitic phase transitions: study of the effective dipole-dipole correlation between neighbor domains

Abstract

A model for the growth of martensitic domains during a structural phase transition is studied by numerical simulation. As a consequence of the absence of retransformation mechanism, the domains in the final microstructure show an effective dipole-dipole correlation, increasing the probability of finding neighboring parallel domains. We have focused our attention on a twodimensional case in which two perpendicular symmetrically-related domains grow with, a priori, equal probability. The attractive correlation is shown to decay logarithmically with the perpendicular distance between parallel domains.