Kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of EB-PVD film: Effects of substrate temperature

The 2D kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation was used to study the effects of different substrate temperatures on the microstructure of Ni-Cr films in the process of deposition by the electron beam physical vapor deposition (EB-PVD). In the KMC model, substrate was assumed to be a "surface" of tight-packed rows, and the simulation includes two phenomena: adatom-surface collision and adatom diffusion. While the interaction between atoms was described by the embedded atom method, the jumping energy was calculated by the molecular static (MS) calculation. The initial location of the adatom was defined by the Momentum Scheme. The results reveal that there exists a critical substrate temperature which means that the lowest packing density and the highest surface roughness structure will be achieved when the temperature is lower than the smaller critical value, while the roughness of both surfaces and the void contents keep decreasing with the substrate temperature increasing until it reaches the higher critical value. The results also indicate that the critical substrate temperature rises as the deposition rate increases.