Phase field study of the effect of grain boundary energy anisotropy on grain growth

We study the effect of grain boundary energy anisotropy on grain growth in polycrystalline materials using the multiphase field approach. In contrast to previous studies, the energy anisotropy here is not restricted to low misorientation angles between adjacent grains. Phase field simulations of grain growth in systems require a large number of order parameters to describe the individual grains. The concomitant computational expense restricted studies to small numbers of order parameters and, implicitly, the misorientation angles to a small finite number of discrete values. The treatment of large number of order parameters and continuous misorientation angles is made possible here using the active parameter tracking algorithm [S. Vedantam, B.S.V. Patnaik, Phys. Rev. E 73 (2006) 016703]. The high angle grain boundary energy is taken to be given by an extension of the Read-Shockley energy for low angle grain boundaries [D. Wolf, Scripta Metall. 23 (1989) 1713]. It is found that while the Read-Shockley anisotropic grain boundary energy decreases the growth rate over the isotropic case, the extended Read-Shockley energy system has significantly lower the growth rates.