Large scale numerical simulation of microstructural evolution in elastically stressed solids

We perform large scale numerical simulations of particle coarsening in an elastically anisotropic system. The system we consider is composed of coherent misfitting second phase particles. In this case the excess energy of the system is given by a sum of the interfacial and elastic energies, and the interfaces move by the flow of mass through the matrix in order to reduce the excess energy. We employ efficient computational methods which allow us to study very large systems. The simulations are started using circular particles randomly placed in a computational cell. During coarsening the particles change their shapes from circles to fourfold symmetric shapes to twofold symmetric shapes. In addition, the particles tend to align along 〈100〉 directions due to the configurational forces generated by other particles. The radial distribution functions are computed to obtain quantitative information about the anisotropic evolution of the microstructures.