Grain Boundary Energy and Grain Growth in Highly-Textured Al Films and Foils: Experiment and Simulation

Abstract

Relative grain boundary energy as a function of misorientation angle was measured in a cube-oriented, 120 µm-thick Al foil and in a <111> fiber-textured, 1.7 µm-thick Al film using a multiscale analysis of the grain boundary dihedral angles. For the Al foil, the energies of low-angle boundaries increased with misorientation angle, in good agreement with the Read-Shockley model. For the Al film, two energy minima were observed for high-angle boundaries. Grain growth was studied in 25 and 100 nm-thick films that were annealed at 400 °C for a series of times in the range of 0.5 to 10 h. For the 100 nm-thick film, grains approximately doubled their size (equivalent circular diameter) before grain growth stagnated. The steady-state distributions of reduced grain area for two-dimensional, Monte Carlo Potts and partial differential equation based simulations showed excellent agreement with each other, even when anisotropic boundary energies were used. However, the simulated distributions had fewer small grains than the experimental distributions.