Mixing enthalpies of alloys with dynamical instability: bcc Ti-V system

Abstract Enthalpy of mixing is among the key materials parameters to determine phase stability and phase transformations in solid solutions. The possibility to predict it from first principles in the framework of the density functional theory is one of the corner stones of the modern materials modeling and the future data-driven materials design. Here we have considered body-centered cubic (bcc) Ti-V alloys, a system with high potential for aerospace, automotive biomedical and energy applications, which is known to exhibit the dynamical instability of the crystal lattice for Ti-rich alloys at low temperature. We have calculated the mixing enthalpies ΔH of bcc Ti-V alloys in the whole interval of concentration at high temperature using ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations. A comparison with state-of-the-art static calculations at temperature 0 K shows drastic difference between the two methods: while AIMD predicts positive values of ΔH in the whole range of concentrations, the static zero-temperature simulations result in negative values of ΔH for Ti-rich alloys. We have measured the mixing enthalpy of bcc Ti-V alloys experimentally at 1073 K using an isoperibol high temperature Tian-Calvet calorimeter and found that the enthalpies are positive, in agreement with our finite temperature AIMD calculations. We attribute the failure of the standard static calculations of ΔH to lattice distortions associated with the dynamical instability of bcc Ti-V alloys at zero temperature and argue that the effect should be generally important in theoretical predictions of thermodynamic properties, especially for systems with dynamical instability.