A 3D Monte Carlo study of the effect of grain boundary anisotropy and particles on the size distribution of grains after recrystallisation and grain growth

The present paper considers 3D grain size distributions and how they evolve during and after recrystallisation and grain growth as investigated by a 3D Potts Monte Carlo (MC) model. Two particular cases have been studied: (i) the effects of anisotropy in grain boundary energy and boundary mobility on grain size distributions after recrystallisation and (ii) the effects of second phase particles on the size distributions after both recrystallisation and grain growth. The present 3D MC simulations have shown that anisotropy has a strong effect on the size distributions of grains after recrystallisation, however, mainly in terms of a large and increasing fraction of small grains with increasing anisotropy. After "correcting" for the unrealistic large number of small grains, the differences between the different cases become quite small, but based on an evaluation of the skewness in these "corrected" grain size distributions, a small shift from a normal towards a log-normal-like distribution is still indicated. Concerning the effect of particles, simulations have shown that for an increasing volume fraction of particles, the coarsened microstructures show a clear shift from a Gaussian like towards a log-normal-like distribution. This behaviour is observed both for grain growth alone and for recrystallisation and subsequent coarsening. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.