On Gibbs Energy for the Metastable bcc_A2 Phase with a Thermal Vacancy in Metals and Alloys

An approach was proposed to obtain a reasonable thermodynamic description of a thermal vacancy in the metastable disordered body centered cubic (bcc_A2) phase, which had been consistently ignored in previous thermodynamic assessments. The present approach was first applied to obtain the thermodynamic descriptions for pure metastable bcc Ni and Zn, and then in the binary Ni-Zn system. The thermodynamic descriptions for both the metastable disordered bcc_A2 phase and the stable ordered bcc_B2 β phases in the Ni-Zn binary system were updated based on the corresponding experimental equilibria. With these updated thermodynamic descriptions, several drawbacks, including the multiple solutions for thermal vacancy concentrations and the artificial phase boundaries in previous assessments, can be avoided. Moreover, the calculated phase boundaries and invariant reactions related to the β phase agree well with the experimental data.