Roundness of grains in cellular microstructures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the distribution and properties of polyhedral grains in microstructures, revealing that most are of fundamental types and 'round' in a combinatorial sense, with implications for their stability and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces the concepts of fundamental and vertex-truncated types and analyzes their distribution in grain growth microstructures, highlighting the prevalence of round grains and their stability.

Findings

Most grains are fundamental types

Vertex-truncated types decrease exponentially with truncations

Round grains are more resistant to topological change

Abstract

Many physical systems are composed of polyhedral cells of varying sizes and shapes. These structures are simple in the sense that no more than three faces meet at an edge and no more than four edges meet at a vertex. This means that individual cells can usually be considered as simple, three-dimensional polyhedra. This paper is concerned with determining the distribution of combinatorial types of such polyhedral cells. We introduce the terms \emph{fundamental} and \emph{vertex-truncated} types and apply these concepts to the grain growth microstructure as a testing ground. For these microstructures we demonstrate that most grains are of particular fundamental types, whereas the frequency of vertex-truncated types decreases exponentially with the number of truncations. This can be explained by the evolutionary process through which grain growth structures are formed, and in which energetically unfavorable surfaces are quickly eliminated. Furthermore, we observe that these grain types are `round' in a combinatorial sense: there are no `short' separating cycles that partition the polyhedra into two parts of similar sizes. A particular microstructure derived from the Poisson--Voronoi initial condition is identified as containing an unusually large proportion of round grains. This Round microstructure has an average of $14.036$ faces per grain, and is conjectured to be more resistant to topological change than the steady-state grain growth microstructure.