Experimental Evidence of Capillary-Dominated Entirely Detached Growth in a Vertical Directional Solidification (VDS) Process  Under 1g

Dattatray Bhairu Gadkari

Experimental Evidence of Capillary-Dominated Entirely Detached Growth in a Vertical Directional Solidification (VDS) Process Under 1g

Author(s)	Dr Dattatray Bhairu Gadkari
Country	India
Abstract	Entirely detached crystal growth under terrestrial gravity has been experimentally observed in the VDS process since the 1994s, yet its physical origin has remained unresolved within classical solidification theory. Conventional gravity-based criteria implicitly assume continuous mechanical contact between the melt and the container wall, leading to buoyancy-driven convection and gravity-influenced interface instability. In contrast, VDS experiments consistently demonstrate sustained wall-decoupled growth, characterized by a stable gas-filled gap between the crystal and the container and by microgravity-like transport behaviour under 1g conditions. Stability maps constructed in Bond number–Capillary number space show that VDS experimental conditions lie deep within the capillary-dominated regime, whereas conventional growth systems remain gravity-controlled. Dewetted Bridgman and microgravity solidification data occupy intermediate and overlapping regions, providing independent validation of the proposed framework. These results demonstrate that sustained detached growth under terrestrial gravity arises from capillary stabilization rather than gravity reduction, establishing VDS as a practical terrestrial analogue of microgravity solidification. In this work, we present a combined experimental and dimensionless analysis that establishes entirely detached growth in VDS as a capillary-dominated solidification regime. Systematic growth experiments on Sb-based semiconductor systems reveal stable detached interfaces, suppressed transverse transport, improved crystallographic quality, and reduced defect densities compared with conventional wall-contact growth. By explicitly incorporating capillary effects through the Bond and Capillary numbers, we formulate the Gadkari Detached Stability Criterion (GDSC), which quantitatively distinguishes gravity-influenced wall-contact growth from capillary-dominated wall-decoupled growth.
Keywords	Keywords: VDS detached process; Sb-based solidification; Capillary-driven growth; Young–Laplace Effect; Mullins–Sekerka stability; Soret effect; Gadkari Stability Criterion; Microgravity analog;
Field	Physics
Published In	Volume 17, Issue 2, April-June 2026
Published On	2026-05-04

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Experimental Evidence of Capillary-Dominated Entirely Detached Growth in a Vertical Directional Solidification (VDS) Process Under 1g

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