First-principles study of atomic ordering in bcc Cu-Al

摘要

The order-disorder transitions and phase stability in the body centered cubic structure of Cu-Al binary alloys are studied by means of theoretical methods. The total energy of different ordered compounds sharing a common bcc Bravais lattice was calculated within the framework of density functional theory. A set of effective cluster interactions was calculated through a cluster expansion (CE) of the total energies. The finite temperature phase diagram of bcc Cu-Al was obtained using the CE formalism coupled with the cluster variation method calculation of the configurational entropy. These results are confronted with a simpler semi-empirical approach based on effective pair interactions obtained from experiment. Both approaches predict a single first-order A2/DO_3 transition for compositions close to Cu_3Al, in agreement with the most recent experimental results.