Effect of grain boundary energy anisotropy on highly textured grain structures studied by phase-field simulations

Two-dimensional phase-field simulations were performed of grain growth in highly textured materials with equal fractions of two texture components, denoted as α and β grains, and assuming two values of the grain boundary energies, namely σlow for the boundaries between grains of a different texture component and σhigh for boundaries between grains of a similar orientation, resulting in microstructures with alternating α and β grains and stable quadruple junctions. For different magnitudes of the anisotropy in grain boundary energy R=σhigh/σlow, the occurrence of the different types of triple and quadruple junctions and the distributions of the normalized grain size, the number of faces per grain, the normalized grain boundary length per grain and the dihedral angles at grain boundary junctions were investigated.