Progress in the Investigations of Grain Boundary Relaxation

Internal friction (or damping) is a measure of energy dissipation during mechanical vibration. The internal friction peak induced by grain boundary (GB) relaxation was discovered by Kê in polycrystals in 1947. The GB internal friction and related anelastic effects have been successfully interpreted by Zener's anelastic theory and viscous sliding model. Since then, the GB internal friction peak has been widely used to study the dynamic process of GBs, impurity segregation at GBs and relevant processes in materials science.

Previously, the GB internal friction was mostly studied with polycrystalline materials, in which mixed contributions of different types of GBs are involved. Since the microstructures and behaviors for different types of GBs are different, the detailed mechanism of the GB peak in polycryatals has not been clearly clarified.

From the beginning of the 21th century, the internal friction in bicrystals (each has a single boundary) with different misorientations and rotation axes has been systematically investigated. The results indicate that the internal friction can be used to distinguish the individual behavior of different types of GBs and applied to the practice of “GB engineering.”

Moreover, the coupling effect and compensation effect involved in GB relaxation has been recently observed and explained. The coupling effect means a correlated atomic motion occurred in GB relaxation. The compensation effect indicates that the apparent activation enthalpy is linearly related to the activation entropy in GB relaxation. These findings improve the understanding of the mechanism of GB internal friction.

This article attempts to give a comprehensive review to the investigations of GB internal friction in polycrystals, bamboo-crystals, and bicrystals. The microscopic mechanisms and the further applications of GB internal friction are discussed and prospected.