ABSTRACT
Aluminium-based alloys constitute a major group of industrial materials, incorporating some designed for a range of applications, some for as-cast components and others to be used as wrought materials. Among the main alloy elements are copper, magnesium and silicon; the aluminium-rich binary and ternary systems involving these elements are of great interest. Some of the oxide compositions within the ternary system are important in the slag chemistry of steel making and other extraction metallurgy processes. The existence of binary and ternary compounds gives rise to systems which include a series of solidification reactions: peritectic and eutectic, including ternary invariant reactions; thus, liquidus projections are often complex. Although the solidification and solid state reactions is complex in the ternary and higher order aluminium alloys, modelling of aluminium alloys benefits from the fact that few intermediate phases exhibit wide ranges of stoichiometry.
