Grain growth in systems with anisotropic boundary mobility: Analytical model and computer simulation

Abstract

We investigate the effect of anisotropy in grain boundary mobility on the dynamics, morphology, and topology of grain growth, using both analytical and numerical calculations on a generalized anisotropic phase field model. The dependence of the grain boundary mobility on both inclination and misorientation is included. In contrast to the isotropic case, where a single grain in a polycrystalline system grows linearly with time, it is found that the growth rate of a single n-sided grain in the anisotropic case is time dependent. The growth rate of the average area is also time dependent, except for the two limiting cases of textured and randomly oriented grain structures. However, strong grain shape anisotropy develops in the textured case, indicating that the grains grow in a non-self-similar manner. In the intermediate case, the deviation from a growth exponent of unity is of order 10%, while the size and edge distributions are similar to those of the isotropic system. Our results indicate that statistical self-similarity may not be required for linear growth kinetics and time-invariant size and edge distributions.