Abstract: Many technologically useful materials are polycrystals composed of small monocrystalline grains that are separated by grain boundaries of crystallites with different lattice orientations. The changes in the grain and grain boundary structure of polycrystals highly influence the material’s properties, including, but not limited to, electrical, mechanical, optical, and thermal. Thus, one of the central problems in materials science is to design technologies capable of delivering an arrangement of grains that produces 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. The evolution of the grain/grain boundary structure and associated grain growth is a very complex, multiscale, and multiphysics process. It involves, for example, the dynamics of grain boundaries, triple junctions in 2D (triple curves/lines and quadruple points in 3D), and the dynamics of lattice misorientations. Therefore, grain growth 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 individual grains combined with stochastic models for the interaction between them. In this talk, we will present recent perspectives on mathematical modeling, numerical simulation, and mathematical analysis of the evolution of the grain boundary network in polycrystalline microstructures. Relevant recent experiments, along with current and future research, will be discussed as well.

Part of this talk is based on the recent collaboration/work with Katayun Barmak, Batuhan Bayir, William M Feldman, David Kinderlehrer, Chang (Kamala) Liu, Chun Liu, Masashi Mizuno, Thuong Nguyen, Matthew Patrick, and Jeffrey Rickman, and is partially supported by the DMREF program under DMS-2118172 Award and the Simons Foundation Fellowship Award SFI-MPS-SFM-00010667.

Contact: Selim Esedoglu