Morphological characterization of bicontinuous microstructures using two-point statistics

Abstract

Bicontinuous structures are found in a wide range of multiphase materials. We employ the prototypical bicontinuous structure that is found following spinodal decomposition to probe the morphology and evolution of bicontinuous two-phase mixtures during coarsening using two-point statistics of the mean, total curvature, and the interfacial velocity. We find that the relative spatial variations of the interfacial velocity are larger than those of the mean curvature. In addition, interfaces with high positive and high negative values of the mean curvature, total curvature and interfacial velocity are spatially localized. Finally, the spatial distribution of interfaces with near zero interfacial velocity largely resembles that of near zero mean curvature, and have correlations only over very short distances.