
5.8 Substitutional diffusion 101
5.8 Substitutional diffusion
The flux of any transport process must be given relative to some frame of reference.
For heat conduction in a solid material it is natural to fix the frame to the material itself
because it will not be much affected by the process. However, there may be some heat
expansion of the material and the formal description may thus be simplified if distances
in the frame are measured as atomic distances. In a crystalline material the frame of
reference will thus be fixed to the crystalline lattice. In metallic solutions diffusion
normally occurs by atoms jumping into neighbouring vacant sites in the lattice. From
a fundamental point of view it may thus seem natural to describe diffusion in a lattice-
fixed frame. For diffusion of atoms dissolved interstitially in a host lattice the situation
would be somewhat similar to the case of heat conduction if one had chosen a frame
fixed to the host lattice. However, there may be a small effect due to the interstitial atoms
expanding the host lattice and it would again be an advantage to measure distances in
atomic distances.
The situation is different in a substitutional solution where the solute atoms occupy
the same kind of lattice sites as the host atoms. A lattice-fixed frame may thus expand
or contract locally if the solute atoms diffuse with a different rate to that of the solvent
atoms. Experimentally, it may be easiest to study substitutional diffusion in a volume-
fixed frame. If the solute atoms diffuse faster and by a vacancy mechanism, there would
be a net flow of atoms in one direction and of vacancies in the other relative to the
lattice. Vacancies would thus have to be generated in some places and condense in
other places, resulting in local creation or disappearance of lattice sites. There could
be a considerable difference between the lattice-fixed and volume-fixed frames. It is of
considerable practical importance to be able to transform diffusion data from one frame
to another and that is done by defining different sets of processes in different frames and
to transform between them. We shall first discuss this for a simple binary system and
transform from the lattice-fixed frame to a number-fixed frame, which is identical to the
volume-fixed frame if the molar volume is constant. A more general treatment will then
be given, which could easily be extended to the volume-fixed frame.
Primarily we shall describe diffusion of individual components relative to the
lattice-fixed frame. The diffusing atoms will transport volume with a rate V
i
J
i
,where
V
i
is the partial molar volume and that transport can be studied experimentally by
placing small inert markers in the material. They are called Kirkendall markers and can
be assumed to be fixed to the lattice. They will thus move with a velocity υ =−V
i
J
i
relative to the volume-fixed frame. Expressed as mol/s m
2
the Kirkendall shift will thus
be represented by the flux
J
∗
K
= υ/V
m
=−
n
i=1
a
i
J
i
, (5.109)
where a
i
= V
i
/V
m
and x
i
a
i
= 1. Let the flux of a component j be J
∗
j
in the volume-
fixed frame. If the lattice-fixed frame moves with a velocity υ relative to the volume-fixed
frame, e.g. measured by the Kirkendall shift, then the flux in the lattice-fixed frame will be
J
j
= J
∗
j
− x
j
υ/V
m
. (5.110)