Exploring the dynamics of grain growth and coarsening in polycrystalline materials through finite-element method and multiphase-field simulation

A two-dimensional multiphase-field model has been developed using finite-element based technique to study the temporal evolution of grain growth and coarsening in polycrystalline materials. This work, for the first time, demonstrates a simple programming based approach to simulate complex microstructure evolution during polycrystalline grain formation developed using finite-element software suite, popularly known as COMSOL Multiphysics. The effect of the initial nucleation condition on the evolution of the final polycrystalline microstructure has been systematically investigated. Moreover, an optimization study has been performed to compare the computational efficiency of the adaptive mesh over a default triangular shaped static mesh available in COMSOL Multiphysics. In addition, this study also investigates the temperature dependence of grain growth in polycrystalline materials. A comparative analysis between our simulated results and experimental observations demonstrates good agreement and, thus, validates our proposed method.