Source: Sina Shahbazmohamadi and Peiman Shahbeigi-Roodposhti-Roodposhti, School of Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT Directional solidification zone melting is a metallurgical process in which a narrow region of a crystal (usually in the form of bar) is melted. The furnace moves along the rod shape sample, meaning that the molten zone is moved along the crystal and the molten zone is moved from one end of the bar to the other. This mechanism is widely used in alloys, however solute atoms tend to segregate to the melt. In this type of alloy, the impurities also concentrate in the melt, and move to one end of the sample along with the moving molten zone. Therefore, zone melting is used most extensively for commercial material refining. Fig. 1. shows how the high-impurity molten-zone moves from one side of the bar to the other. The vertical axis is the impurity concentration and the horizontal axis is the sample length. Due to the tendency for impurities to segregate to the molten region, its concentration in the melt is higher than in the solid. Therefore, as the molten materials travel to the end of bar, the impurity will be transported to the end of bar and leave the high purity solid material behind it. Figure 1: Schematic of the composition change during zone melting directional solidification. In this study, a zone melting directional solidification apparatus will be employed to synthesize stable structures of Pb-Cd alloys.