Data-driven analysis of grain-growth kinetics in duplex and triplex systems

TL;DR

This study employs statistical tools to analyze how phase-grain evolution influences overall grain-growth kinetics in duplex and triplex systems, revealing major-phase grains primarily govern growth rates and their volume-fraction impacts the kinetics exponentially.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive statistical analysis of grain-growth kinetics in multiphase systems, highlighting the dominant role of major-phase grains and their volume-fraction effects, which was not previously quantified.

Findings

Major-phase grain growth rate governs overall kinetics.

Overall grain-growth rate increases exponentially with major-phase volume-fraction.

Minimal interaction observed between minor-phase grains during growth.

Abstract

During grain growth in multiphase system, a convincing understanding on how the evolution kinetics of an individual phase-grains relates to the growth rate of entire microstructure is yet to be achieved. Therefore, in this work, comfortably comprehensible statistical tools are employed to realise the influence of the evolving phase-grains on the overall grain-growth kinetics of multiphase systems, both duplex and triplex, with varying phase-fractions. A dataset capable of rendering statistically significant, and accessible, information is built by modelling, and analysing, grain growth in twenty different polycrystalline systems, comprising of fourteen triplex and five duplex microstructures with varying phase-fractions, and one homogeneous single-phase system, in multiphase-field framework. Statistical analyses of these wide-range of microstructures unravel that, during isotropic grain-growth, the overall evolution kinetics of the duplex and triplex systems are principally governed by the growth-rate of the major-phase grains, irrespective of the phase-fractions. Furthermore, through multiple non-linear regression, it is realised that with increase in the volume-fraction of the major-phase grains, the overall isotropic grain-growth rate exhibited by duplex and triplex microstructures increase in accordance with a definite exponential relation. Additionally, the present investigation unravels that, while the evolution of individual phase-grains during grain growth in triplex microstructures exhibit a level of interdependency, the least interaction is observed between the grains of minor-phases with relatively low volume-fraction.