Morphology development during Ostwald ripening in elastically stressed solids

We study the Ostwald ripening of second-phase particles in an elastically anisotropic system using a two-dimensional numerical simulation. Both the particles and the matrix are assumed to be elastically homogeneous and anisotropic with cubic symmetry, and the interfaces are assumed to be coherent. A large scale simulation starts with 4000 circular particles placed randomly over the computational domain. We calculate the evolution of the system and follow the change in particle shapes, the relative particle positions, and the average particle size. In this paper, we will present preliminary results on the morphological evolution, focusing our attention on low-volume-fraction systems in which the interfacial energy is dominant at the initial stage of the simulation. Our results show that the morphology that develops during the coarsening is significantly different when elastic stress is present. The qualitative nature of the changes is presented both in physical space and in the scattering functions.