Heterogeneities of grain boundary arrangement in polycrystals

Data on mutual arrangements of different types of grain boundaries in polycrystals are presented. The heterogeneity in grain boundary distribution, namely, the effect of gathering low-angle or special tilt grain boundaries is found in pure aluminum thin films, in sheets of Fe-3% Si alloy and in Al₂O₃ doped with MgO or MgO and Y ₂O₃. The local texture, i.e., formation of colonies or clusters of close-oriented grains is considered as a reason of this heterogeneity. The influences of grain boundary gathering on the transport properties of polycrystals and on the crack propagation are discussed. A new concept of effective grain size is suggested to analyze the relationship between material microstructures and material properties.     

Using Pseudoperiodicity for Polycrystal XRD Determination of the General Structural Motif of Coordination Compounds

This review summarizes experience in polycrystal diffractogram analysis for 100 coordination compounds using the translation sublattice isolation technique. The most widespread cases are described, and the general strategy of analysis is proposed. Conditions for transition from a rhombohedral sublattice to cubic lattices with different centerings are discussed.     

Shape effect of elongated grains on ultrasonic attenuation in polycrystalline materials

Longitudinal and transverse wave attenuation coefficients are obtained in a simple integral form for ultrasonic waves in cubic polycrystalline materials with elongated grains. Dependences of attenuation on frequency and grain shape are described in detail. The explicit analytical solutions for ellipsoidal grains in the Rayleigh and stochastic frequency limits are given for a wave propagating in an arbitrary direction relative to ellipsoid axes. The attenuation exhibits classic frequency dependence in those frequency limits. However, the dependence on the grain shape in the stochastic limits is unexpected: it is independent of the cross-section of the ellipsoidal grains and depends only on the grain dimension in the propagation direction. In the Rayleigh region attenuation is proportional to effective volume of the ellipsoidal grain and is independent of its shape. A complex behavior of attenuation on the grain shape/size and frequency is exhibited in the transition region. The results obtained reduce to the classic dependences of attenuation on parameters for polycrystals with equiaxed grains.     

Stochastic homogenization of heat transfer in polycrystals with nonlinear contact conductivities

The heat transfer problem in a polycrystal with nonlinear jump conditions on the grain boundaries will be homogenized using the method of stochastic two-scale convergence developed by Zhikov and Pyatnitskii [V.V. Zhikov and A.L. Pyatnitskii, Homogenization of random singular structures and random measures, Izv. Math. 70(1) (2006), pp. 19–67] and recently extended by the author [M. Heida, An extension of stochastic two-scale convergence and application, Asympt. Anal. (2010) (in press)]. It will be shown that for monotone Lipschitz jump conditions differentiable in 0, the nonlinearity vanishes in the limit. Additionally, existing Poincaré inequalities will be extended to more general geometric settings with the only restriction of local C ¹-interfaces with finite intensity. In particular, the result can now be applied to the Poisson–Voronoi tessellation.     

Direction-dependent functions of physical properties for crystals and polycrystals

Some physical properties of crystals differ in direction n because crystal lattices are often anisotropic. A polycrystal is an aggregate of numerous tiny crystallites. Unless the polycrystal is an isotropic aggregate of crystallites, the physical properties of the polycrystal vary with n. The direction-dependent functions （DDF） for crystals and polycrystals are introduced to describe the variations of the physical properties in direction n. Until now there are few papers dealing systematically with relations between the DDF and the crystalline orientation distribution. Herein we give general expressions of the DDF for crystals and polycrystals. We discuss the applications of the DDF in describing the physical properties of crystals and polycrystals.     

DOMAIN AVERAGE SCM AND CONSTITUTIVE MODELLING OF POLYCRYSTALLINE AGGREGATES

A theoretical framework for the approximate constitutive assembly of polycrystals,termed henceforth domain average self consistent method, is developed to extend to SCM ofHill to adhered or sliding aggregates of arbitrary grain shape. The legitimacy and usefulnessof the current theory are justified by the polycrystals composed of cubic grains and slidingspherical grains.     

X-ray interferometers as a means of super-high-precision metrology (review)

The review considers the present state of the art in the field of x-ray interferometry and its potential use for detecting and measuring nanometer-scale translations of microobjects. Basic physical models used for producing and investigating x-ray wave interference and moire patterns are presented. To whom correspondence should be addressed. Institute of Electronics, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, 22, Logoiskii Trakt, Minsk, 220841, Belarus. Translated from Zhurnal Prikladnoi Spekiroskopi, Vol. 66, No. 4, pp. 451–459, July–August, 1999.     

Effect of texture and grain shape on ultrasonic backscattering in polycrystals

An ultrasonic backscattering model is developed for textured polycrystalline materials with orthotropic or trigonal grains of ellipsoidal shape. The model allows us to simulate realistic microstructures and orthotropic macroscopic material textures resulting from thermomechanical processing for a broad variety of material symmetries. The 3-D texture is described by a modified Gaussian orientation distribution function (ODF) of the crystallographic orientation of the grains along the macroscopic texture direction. The preferred texture directions are arbitrary relative to the axes of the ellipsoidal grains. The averaged elastic covariance and the directional anisotropy of the backscattering coefficient are obtained for a wave propagation direction arbitrary relative to the texture and grain elongation directions. One particular application of this analysis is the backscattering solution for cubic crystallites with common textures such as Cube, Goss, Brass and Copper. In our analysis, in the texture-defined coordinates the matrix of elastic constants for cubic crystallites takes the form of orthotropic or trigonal symmetry. Numerical results are presented, discussed and compared to the experimental data available in the literature illustrating the dependence of the backscattering coefficient on texture and grain shape.     

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.