Influence of anisotropic grain boundary properties on the evolution of grain boundary character distribution during grain growth - a 2D level set study

The present study elaborates on a 2D level set model of polycrystal microstructures that was recently established by adding the influence of anisotropic grain boundary energy and mobility on microstructure evolution. The new model is used to trace the evolution of grain boundary character distribution during grain growth. The employed level set formulation conveniently allows the grain boundary characteristics to be quantified in terms of coincidence site lattice (CSL) type per unit of grain boundary length, providing a measure of the distribution of such boundaries. In the model, both the mobility and energy of the grain boundaries are allowed to vary with misorientation. In addition, the influence of initial polycrystal texture is studied by comparing results obtained from a polycrystal with random initial texture against results from a polycrystal that initially has a cube texture. It is shown that the proposed level set formulation can readily incorporate anisotropic grain boundary properties and the simulation results further show that anisotropic grain boundary properties only have a minor influence on the evolution of CSL boundary distribution during grain growth. As anisotropic boundary properties are considered, the most prominent changes in the CSL distributions are an increase of general low-angle Σ1 boundaries as well as a more stable presence of Σ3 boundaries. The observations also hold for the case of an initially cube-textured polycrystal. The presence of this kind of texture has little influence over the evolution of the CSL distribution. Taking into consideration the anisotropy of grain boundary properties, grain growth alone does not seem to be sufficient to promote any significantly increased overall presence of CSL boundaries.