12. Conclusion

The understanding and control of precipitation kinetics in alloys has progressed considerably thanks to the combination of quantitative experimental techniques and physically-based models. However, the situations encountered in industrial alloys, where the chemical composition is complex, the microstructures contain structural defects, and the heat treatment paths are non-isothermal, involve degrees of complexity such that a fully predictive description remains difficult.

The models generally used are sufficiently flexible to describe experimental results satisfactorily, but great care must be taken when extrapolating to conditions not accessible to experiment, for example those due to complex compositions resulting from recycling