In crystalline materials, plastic deformation occurs by the motion of dislocations, and the regions between individual crystallites, called grain boundaries, act as obstacles to dislocation motion. Grain boundaries are widely envisaged to be mechanically static structures, but this report outlines an experimental investigation of stress-driven grain boundary migration manifested as grain growth...

Grain boundary segregation leads to nanoscale chemical variations that can alter a material's performance by orders of magnitude (e.g., embrittlement). To understand this phenomenon, a large number of grain boundaries must be characterized in terms of both their five crystallographic interface parameters and their atomic-scale chemical composition. We demonstrate how this can be achieved using ...

Yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) has been widely used as electrolyte in solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). The effect of fabrication process on the properties of YSZ electrolyte thick film is discussed in the paper. With YSZ nano-powders of about 20-60nm as raw material, YSZ green adobe was fabricated by tape calendering process. Three-step sintering process was performed firstly holding at 1000°C f...

The conditions for grain boundary (GB) structural transitions are determined from a diffuse interface model that incorporates structural disorder and crystallographic orientation. A graphical construction and numerical calculations illustrate the existence of a first-order GB order–disorder transition below the bulk melting point. When thermodynamic conditions permit their existence, disordered...

We describe an optical scattering study of grain boundary premelting in water ice. Ubiquitous long ranged attractive polarization forces act to suppress grain boundary melting whereas repulsive forces originating in screened Coulomb interactions and classical colligative effects enhance it. The liquid enhancing effects can be manipulated by adding dopant ions to the system. For all measured gra...

The grain boundary character distribution in commercially pure Al has been measured as a function of lattice misorientation and boundary plane orientation. The results demonstrate a tendency to terminate grain boundaries on low index planes with relatively low surface energies and large interplanar spacings. The most frequently observed grain boundary plane orientation is (111). However, there ...

A low voltage argon ion sputter technique was used to form grain boundary junctions in YBa2Cu307-, thin films on MgO. The YBa2Cu307--x thin film grown on a pre-sputtered region of MgO was rotated 45’ about the [OOl] axis relative to the YBa.&!u,O,-, thin film grown on an adjacent unsputtered region of the substrate. YBazCu,07-. thin films were grown using pulsed organometallic beam epitaxy (POM...

We study domain coarsening of two-dimensional stripe patterns by numerically solving the Swift-Hohenberg model of Rayleigh-Bénard convection. Near the bifurcation threshold, the evolution of disordered configurations is dominated by grain-boundary motion through a background of largely immobile curved stripes. A numerical study of the distribution of local stripe curvatures, of the structure fa...

Chemical composition of interfaces—free surfaces and grain boundaries—is generally described by the Langmuir–McLean segregation isotherm controlled by Gibbs energy of segregation. Various components of the Gibbs energy of segregation, the standard and the excess ones as well as other thermodynamic state functions—enthalpy, entropy and volume—of interfacial segregation are derived and their phys...