Shear-Coupled Grain Growth Statistics

TL;DR

This paper investigates how shear coupling influences two-dimensional grain growth, revealing that internal stresses significantly alter microstructure evolution, leading to more heterogeneous structures and stress-dependent growth behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of shear-coupled grain growth using continuum modeling and simulations, highlighting the impact of shear coupling on microstructure and kinetics.

Findings

Shear coupling results in more heterogeneous microstructures.

Internal stress relaxation affects grain growth rates.

Stressed grains tend to shrink faster, lightly stressed grains grow faster.

Abstract

Grain growth (GG), driven by grain boundary (GB) migration, is a fundamental mechanism of microstructural evolution in polycrystalline materials. GB migration is frequently accompanied by a relative shear displacement of grains meeting at GBs, a phenomenon known as shear coupling. This coupling induces internal stresses within the microstructure, which recent studies have shown to play a decisive role in dictating the evolution of microstructure and GG pathways. This work provides a detailed characterization of the statistical features of two-dimensional GG in the presence of GB shear coupling through continuum modeling of GB migration that incorporates fundamental microscopic mechanisms and diffuse-interface simulations. We demonstrate that incorporating shear coupling produces a more heterogeneous, less equiaxed microstructure than conventional curvature-driven GG, while yielding topological and geometric properties consistent with experimental and atomistic observations. We further demonstrate that as grain grows, internal stress relaxes. Highly stressed grains shrink faster, and lightly stressed grains grow faster than other grains. These findings demonstrate that internal stress, an intrinsic feature of GG, profoundly changes essential features of GG microstructure and kinetics, consistent with experiments and atomic-scale simulations.