High-fidelity level-set modeling of polycrystalline grain growth

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-fidelity level-set modeling framework for simulating polycrystalline grain growth with complex, heterogeneous grain boundary energies, improving accuracy and consistency over existing models.

Contribution

It presents a novel polycrystalline extension of the level-set method that accurately captures grain boundary evolution considering heterogeneity, validated against benchmarks.

Findings

Most energetically consistent grain evolution modeling

Maintains accuracy across heterogeneity spectrum

Highest-fidelity front-capturing level-set approach

Abstract

Accurate modeling of polycrystalline microstructure evolution under strong crystallographic heterogeneities remains a major challenge for full-field numerical methods at the mesoscopic scale. In this work, we present a high-fidelity level-set framework for capillarity-driven grain growth in polycrystals with highly-heterogeneous, disorientation-dependent grain boundary energies. The novel framework represents a polycrystalline extension of our level-set formulation, previously developed and validated using a single triple junction benchmark case. In-depth comparisons with three established level-set models demonstrate that the proposed method yields the most energetically-consistent evolution of grain statistics, disorientation distribution function, and triple junction dihedral angles. Accuracy and robustness are maintained across the entire heterogeneity spectrum. To the best of our knowledge, this approach delivers the highest-fidelity front-capturing level-set modeling of grain growth based on Mullins' mean curvature flow theory, paving the way for state-of-the-art digital twins for annealing applications.