Evaluation of the Component Chemical Potentials in Analytical Models for Ordered Alloy Phases.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Thermodynamics Volume 2011, Article ID 874979, 4 pages doi:10.1155/2011/874979 Research Article Evaluation of the Component Chemical Potentials in Analytical Models for Ordered Alloy Phases W. A. Oates,1 H. Wang,2 D. S. Xu,2 and R. Yang2 1 Institute for Materials Research, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK 2 Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China Correspondence should be addressed to W. A. Oates, aoates@globalnet.co.uk Received 17 November 2010; Accepted 27 January 2011 Academic Editor: Brian J. Edwards Copyright © 2011 W. A. Oates et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The component chemical potentials in models of solution phases with a fixed number of sites can be evaluated easily when the Helmholtz energy is known as an analytical function of composition. In the case of ordered phases, however, the situation is less straightforward, because the Helmholtz energy is a functional involving internal order parameters. Because of this, the chemical potentials are usually obtained numerically from the calculated integral Helmholtz energy. In this paper, we show how the component chemical potentials can be obtained analytically in ordered phases via the use of virtual cluster chemical potentials. Some examples are given which illustrate the simplicity of the method. 1. Introduction Analytical expressions for the chemical potentials can also be derived for models of single lat