Advances in the Mesoscale Approach to Structure-Sensitive Properties Relations in Polycrystalline Materials

Abstract

New methods have recently been conceived for extracting certain intrinsic properties of grain boundaries. Described here is a novel approach to extracting the excess free energy and mobility functions over large components of the entire fundamental space of grain boundary types. The theoretical approach constitutes a new form of inverse problems in materials science, and demands geometrical and orientational characterizations of very large numbers of triple junctions. The experimental approach demands new levels of automation of orientation imaging microscopy, and calibrated serial sectioning to overcome the opacity problem in electron diffraction. The main threads of the approach (theoretical, numerical and experimental) are described in this paper.