Grain Boundaries in Polycrystals: Modeling, Analysis and Simulation.

5^th December 2023, 16:00
Yekaterina Epshteyn
University of Utah, USA

Abstract

Many technologically useful materials are polycrystals composed of small monocrystalline grains that are separated by grain boundaries of crystallites with different lattice orientations. One of the central problems in materials science is to design technologies capable of producing an arrangement of grains that delivers a desired set of material properties. A method by which the grain structure can be engineered in polycrystalline materials is through grain growth (coarsening) of a starting structure. Grain growth in polycrystals is a very complex multiscale multiphysics process. It can be regarded as the anisotropic evolution of a large cellular network and can be described by a set of deterministic local evolution laws for the growth of an individual grain combined with stochastic models for the interaction between them. In this talk, we will present new perspectives on modeling, simulation, and analysis of the evolution of the grain boundary network in polycrystalline materials. Relevant recent experiments will be discussed as well.