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Phase-field simulation of the coupled evolutions of grain and twin boundaries in nanotwinned polycrystals

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Abstract

Nanotwinned polycrystals exhibit an excellent strength-ductility combination due to nanoscale twins and grains. However, nanotwin-assisted grain coarsening under mechanical loading reported in recent experiments may result in strength drop based on the Hall-Petch law. In this paper, a phase-field model is developed to investigate the effect of coupled evolutions of twin and grain boundaries on nanotwin-assisted grain growth. The simulation result demonstrates that there are three pathways for coupled motions of twin and grain boundaries in a bicrystal under the applied loading, dependent on the amplitude of applied loading and misorientation of the bicrystal. It reveals that a large misorientation angle and a large applied stress promote the twinning-driven grain boundary migration. The resultant twin-assisted grain coarsening is confirmed in the simulations for the microstructural evolutions in twinned and un-twinned polycrystals under a high applied stress.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Yujie WEI for helpful discussion and valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

    Yuanyuan Da, Yuyang Lu & Yong Ni

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  1. Yuanyuan Da
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  2. Yuyang Lu
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  3. Yong Ni
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Correspondence to Yong Ni.

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Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11672285), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDB22040502), the Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

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Da, Y., Lu, Y. & Ni, Y. Phase-field simulation of the coupled evolutions of grain and twin boundaries in nanotwinned polycrystals. Appl. Math. Mech.-Engl. Ed. 39, 1789–1804 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-018-2393-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-018-2393-7

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