ABSTRACT
Until now, the understanding of the processes of phase transformations that involve nucleation and growth is far from being complete, even though much effort has been made in their investigation [1,2]. The complicated nature of these processes forces one to use a number of simplifications that allow us to obtain approximate solutions. The classical approach [1,2], based on the Becker-Döring equations, treated the dynamics of the number density of clusters of a new phase in the space of their size and used a thermodynamic approach to calculate the size of a critical cluster above which the clusters grow rapidly. In this way, the nucleation rate and time dependence of the cluster distribution function could be calculated by neglecting the splitting and coagulation of clusters and assuming spherical shapes. The kinetic approach to the problem, described in the preceding sections, is free of macroscopic thermodynamic arguments. However, the shape of the clusters was assumed spherical.
