Conclusion

The examples of heat treatments from the most widely used alloys are enough to convince us of the very wide variety of structures and properties they can be used for, with relatively simple thermal cycles (a few hours, at a few hundred degrees Celsius, in neutral or reducing atmospheres that are fairly easy to industrialize).

As these are solid-state transformations sensitive to weak additions (low precipitated volume fractions, very local crystallographic relationships, important role of segregations at grain boundaries, etc.), it is easy to see the need for thermodynamic data to predict possible phases at equilibrium, and kinetic data to monitor, over reasonable cycles, the degrees of advancement of the various diffusions for critical elements in the alloy's nominal composition.

From a thermodynamic point of view, a number of concepts...