VisiMat©- : Educational tool for multicomponent diffusion in 2 and 3 dimensions

Finding Fick's second law solution for linear diffusion cases is a difficult task when applying to multicomponent systems. Most of the mathematical aspects can be eased by employing software that handles the laborious linear algebra steps. Morral and Thompson [1, 2] developed a well thought methodology for one-dimensional, single-phase, multicomponent diffusion solutions. The method is known as the "Square-Root Diffusivity Method." Implementing this approach for ternary alloys was made convenient through Profiler (c) developed by Morral and co-workers [3, 4, 5, 6]. Here we present VisiMat (c), a 2- and 3-d educational code based on the MatLab (c) computing platform. The new code combines original features available in Profiler (c) as well as those added by Glicksman and Lupulescu [7] and Lupulescu et al. [8, 9] to evaluate single phase ternary alloys and to study the kinetics of zero-flux planes (ZFPs). Although VisiMat (c) [10] could handle numerically any number of components, the 3-d visualizations are not possible for more than four components.