Artifacts of particle stimulated nucleation in 2D and 3D—a numerical analysis

Particle stimulated nucleation is considered to be the dominating nucleation mechanism in many general industrially relevant metallic alloys undergoing thermomechanical processing. In metallography, nuclei are typically defined as particle stimulated if they touch or are close to a second phase particle. In the present work, we numerically investigate how much miscategorisation there can be in this type of analysis. This is done by finding how many nuclei that statistically are next to a particle if all the nuclei and particles are randomly distributed in space. Furthermore, as particle stimulated nucleation is typically quantified by 2D experimental methodologies, it is additionally analysed if an area can correctly quantify the effect of the nucleation mechanism in a bulk sample.