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XtalMesh Toolkit: High-Fidelity Mesh Generation of Polycrystals

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Abstract

A method for generating high-fidelity, boundary conforming tetrahedral mesh of three-dimensional (3D) polycrystalline microstructures is presented. With growing interest into subgrain scale micromechanics of materials, crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) models must adapt not only their respective constitutive laws, but also their model geometry to the finer scale, namely the representation of grains and grain boundary junctions. Additionally, with the increasing availability of microstructure datasets obtained via 3D tomography experiments, it is possible to characterize the 3D topology of grains. From these advancements in experiment emerge both an opportunity and challenge for researchers to develop model microstructures, specifically finite element meshes, which best preserve grain topology for the accurate representation of boundary conditions in polycrystalline materials. To accomplish this, an open-source code called XtalMesh was created and is presented here. XtalMesh works by smoothing input voxel microstructure data using a feature-aware Laplacian smoothing algorithm that preserves complex grain topology and leverages state-of-the-art tetrahedralization code fTetWild to generate volume mesh. In this work, the workflow and associated algorithms of XtalMesh are described in detail using a synthetically generated example microstructure. For demonstration, we present a case study involving mesh generation of an experimentally obtained microstructure of nickel-based superalloy Inconel 718 (IN718).

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences Program DE-SC0018901.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Materials Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Jonathan M. Hestroffer & Irene J. Beyerlein

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Irene J. Beyerlein

Authors
  1. Jonathan M. Hestroffer
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  2. Irene J. Beyerlein
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Correspondence to Jonathan M. Hestroffer.

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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 12
figure 12

a 3D reconstruction of Tribeam experiment dataset for IN718. b Same Tribeam dataset viewed along the x-direction to visualize the rough surface, this area is filled with voxels until flat. c Tribeam dataset with the new surface “cap” of voxels in dark gray. Dataset obtained from Stinville et al. [21]

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Hestroffer, J.M., Beyerlein, I.J. XtalMesh Toolkit: High-Fidelity Mesh Generation of Polycrystals. Integr Mater Manuf Innov 11, 109–120 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40192-022-00251-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40192-022-00251-w

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