Coherent solid/liquid interface with stress relaxation in a phase-field approach to the melting/solidification transition

An advanced Ginzburg-Landau (GL) approach to melting and solidification coupled with mechanics is developed. It is based on the concept of a coherent solid-liquid interface with a transformation strain tensor, the deviatoric part of which is described by a thermodynamically consistent kinetic equation. Due to the relaxation of the elastic energy, a promoting contribution to the driving force for phase transformation in the GL equation appears, both for melting and solidification. Good agreement with known experiments is obtained for Al nanoparticles for the size-dependent melting temperature and temperature-dependent thickness of the surface molten layer. All types of interface stress distributions from known molecular dynamics simulations are obtained and interpreted. A similar approach can be applied for sublimation and condensation, amorphization and vitrification, diffusive transformations, and chemical reactions.