Thermal expansion coefficient of WRe alloys from first principles

Author(s)
Thomas Dengg, Vsevolod Razumovskiy, Lorenz Romaner, Georg Kresse, Peter Puschnig, Juergen Spitaler
Abstract

We calculate the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) in tungsten-rhenium random alloys for Re concentrations between 0% and 50% and for temperatures up to 2400 K by employing the quasiharmonic approximation within the ab initio framework of density functional theory. We treat chemical disorder by the virtual crystal approximation and compute the phonon density of states at two levels of sophistication. While the traditional Debye-Grüneisen (DG) model fails to account for the experimentally observed increase in CTE upon Re addition for concentrations above 10% Re, explicit phonon calculations within density functional perturbation theory lead to an overall good agreement with experiment. Thereby we identify the pronounced phonon softening and anisotropy between transversal and longitudinal modes in W-Re to be responsible for the breakdown of the DG model.

Organisation(s)
Computational Materials Physics
External organisation(s)
MCL Leoben, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Journal
Physical Review B
Volume
96
No. of pages
10
ISSN
2469-9950
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.96.035148
Publication date
07-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103025 Quantum mechanics, 103036 Theoretical physics, 103015 Condensed matter, 103009 Solid state physics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Condensed Matter Physics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/ad89c236-a36f-4698-983c-ef73e5410be1