Investigating the Al/Si mixed site occupancy in the β-AlFeSi phase.

This work investigates the mixed site occupancy of aluminium and silicon atoms in the β-AlFeSi phase. For this purpose, the six mixed Al/Si sites of the β-AlFeSi structure were considered independent and alternatively substituted by Al or Si, thus generating 64 ordered structures or . The enthalpy of formation of each was calculated by DFT.

On the elaboration of the next generation of thermodynamic models of solid solutions.

Thermodynamic models of solid solutions used in computational thermochemistry have not been modernized in recent years. With the advent of fast and cheap computers, it is nowadays possible to add, at a minimal computational cost, physical ingredients such as coordination numbers, inter-atomic distances and classical interatomic potentials to the function describing the energetics of ordered and disordered solid solutions. As we show here, the integration of these elements into a robust statistical thermodynamic model of solution establishes natural connections with other deterministic and stochastic atomistic methods such as Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations.