Grain boundary, triple junction and quadruple point mobility controlled normal grain growth

Grain boundaries, triple junctions, and quadruple points are geometrical elements comprising polycrystalline networks, where these elements have co-dimensions 1, 2, and 3, respectively, and control grain volumes in 3-D. For most materials, with "large" grain sizes, grain boundary mobility usually controls network kinetics. Nonetheless, there are a few papers published to date concerning the effects of grain network elements on the self-similar distributions for scaled grain size and number of faces per grain. Our study applies a polyhedral representation of grains that the authors developed to obtain self-similar LSW-like behavior, with distributions for the three limiting situations: where boundary, triple junction, or quadruple point mobility dominates the kinetics of network evolution. The self-similar states obtained yield important implications concerning details of polycrystalline evolution, such as grain growth “trajectories”, including grain lifetimes and their time-volume behavior. Key results are discussed in detail.Work done in cooperation with Martin E. Glicksman, College of Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA