Five dimensional grain boundary distribution for yttria stabilized zirconia based on experimentally determined macroscopic boundary parameters

Abstract

Distributions showing the frequencies of occurrence of grain boundaries as functions of their 5 macroscopic boundary parameters have been computed for a set of yttria-stabilized zirconia samples sintered at different conditions and thus having different grain sizes. For this purpose, datasets containing both grain misorientation and boundary plane parameters have been collected by the means of the 3D EBSD technique. Then, the 5-parameter distributions have been computed using the approach based on kernel density estimation. A few top peaks are visible in all of the obtained distributions. Their heights exceed the level of the random distribution by at least about 3 multiples of the corresponding statistical errors. The list of favored grain boundaries includes the Σ3/(111) and Σ11/(11¯3) boundaries, as well as the boundaries having both the boundary plane (100) and misorientation by 10∘ to 37∘ about the [100] axis.The largest of the collected dataset containing 64,506 distinct grain boundaries, and being probably the largest dataset of this kind ever collected for zirconia, allowed to study e.g. rare boundaries like those with high Σ misorientations about the [110] axis.