Morphology and growth speed of hcp domains during shock-induced phase transition in iron

Emergence and time evolution of micro-structured new-phase domains play a crucial role in determining the macroscopic physical and mechanical behaviors of iron under shock compression. Here, we investigate, through molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical modelings, shock-induced phase transition process of iron from body-centered-cubic (bcc) to hexagonal-close-packed (hcp) structure. We present a central-moment method and a rolling-ball algorithm to calculate and analyze the morphology and growth speed of the hcp phase domains, and then propose a phase transition model to clarify our derived growth law of the phase domains. We also demonstrate that the new-phase evolution process undergoes three distinguished stages with different time scales of the hcp phase fraction in the system.