Chemical short range order in MgPb alloys

Magnesium and its alloys are the ideal materials for the automotive and aerospace applications due to their light weight, excellent physical and mechanical properties. In recent years, great effort is being made to synthesise Mg-alloys which are superior in corrosion performance and endowed with required thermal and mechanical properties. Despite of the growing interest in such alloys, very little studies exist which analyse the microscopic level bonding and the atomic order which are ultimately responsible for their thermal stability and synthesisation. In the present work, we have used the compound formation model (2Mg + Pb↔Mg₂Pb) to establish the interconnection between the microscopic interactions to the observed thermodynamic properties. It has been used to compute the concentration and the temperature dependence of the excess free energy, concentration fluctuations and chemical short range order which suggests that a reasonable degree of chemical order exist in the alloys.