Grain growth in anisotropic systems: comparison of effects of energy and mobility Original Research Article

Grain growth in systems of anisotropic grain boundary energy and mobility is investigated by computer simulations in a two-dimensional textured polycrystalline system. The energy and mobility are allowed to depend on both grain boundary inclination and misorientation. Mobility anisotropy alone does not significantly change the growth kinetics or statistical distributions of misorientation, grain size and number of grain edges, even though grain shapes evolve in a self-dissimilar fashion where the aspect ratio of grains and inclination distribution of grain boundaries are time dependent. Energy anisotropy, however, causes significant deviation of grain growth kinetics, misorientation and edge-distributions from the ones observed in isotropic systems. Moreover, misorientation distribution is skewed towards low energy (special) boundaries. Size distributions are similar in all cases. Mobility anisotropy influences grain growth kinetics only when energy is also anisotropic. Variation of misorientation distribution with time plays the key role in determining the grain growth behavior.