Whenever there is a concept of diffusion involved and we need to decipher what is going to happen we tend to draw common tangent s in the phase field diagrams and decide which direction the diffusion is going to occur.(Whether the rich will become richer in concentration or it will distribute to maintain uniformity).However I do not understand how drawing tangents and judging their y intercepts will help me to take the decision.Please explain diffusion closely in this context.
The reason is the same as that underlying the Maxwell construction in statistical mechanics. See [1] (see Sec. 2.3 -- note the lower panel in Figure 2.11 -- and Sec. 7.8 herein) and [2] (see in particular Chapter 2 herein).
[1] K Huang, Statistical Mechanics, 2nd edition (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987).
[2] N Provatas, and K Elder, Phase-Field Methods in Materials Science and Engineering (Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2010).
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