Modeling of anisotropic grain growth in minerals

The role of surface energy anisotropy during grain growth is investigated using both physical experiments on octachloropropane and numerical experiments using the Elle microstructural modelling system. In particular the effects of anisotropy on growth rates, grain shapes and lattice preferred orientations are analysed. Anisotropic growth in thin polycrystalline sheets of octachloropropane is found to systematically remove certain c-axis orientations from the sample, without obviously modifying the grain shapes. By comparison with equivalent numerical experiments, we can explain these observations with a simple boundary layer model that treats each side of each grain boundary as an independe…