IMPACT OF ATOMISTIC SIMULATIONS ON UNDERSTANDING GRAIN GROWTH

SM Foiles and EA Holm and DL Olmsted and GS Rohrer and AD Rollett, NANOMETALS - STATUS AND PERSPECTIVE, 15-29 (2012).

Understanding the evolution of grain microstructures is one of the central problems of materials science. This paper provides an overview of some recent efforts to use molecular dynamics simulation methods to obtain some of the fundamental interfacial properties that drive the evolution and also to directly examine grain evolution. The interfacial properties include the energy and free energy of the boundaries as well as the interfacial mobility. The reliability of the energy predictions is assessed by comparisons to recent determinations of grain boundary energy distributions and grain boundary character distributions. Finally, the direct simulation of the annealing of a nanocrystalline grain structure provides insights into the kinetics of nanocrystalline grain growth and suggests an explanation of grain growth stagnation.

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