| The relative grain boundary energy as a function of misorientation angle and axis has been measured in cube-oriented, i.e., {lcub}100{rcub} <100>, 120 mum-thick Al foil using orientation imaging microscopy and a statistical multiscale method. It was found that the energies of low-angle boundaries increase with misorientation angle, in good agreement with the Read-Shockley model and the energy of high-angle boundaries exhibit little variation with misorientation. For the misorientation axis, the energy of [111] boundaries is found to be greater than that of [001] and [101] boundaries.; Examination of the grain structure of <111> fiber-textured, 100 nm-thick Al films annealed at 400°C for 0.5--10 h shows a self similar distribution of the number of sides and the 5 and 6 sided grains to be the most frequent. The mean number of sides is slightly lower than the expected value of 6 for two-dimensional structures.; The lognormal, gamma and Rayleigh distributions were tested against the experimental grain size data, and it was found that the gamma probability density function gives the best fit to the experimental grain size distributions in the films. However, the difference between the lognormal and gamma distributions is not large. It is shown that the tails of the distributions follow a power-law dependence, thereby suggesting that there is a higher probability of observing extreme, i.e., further from the mean, values than in exponential-type tails.; Systematic experimental studies were done of grain growth and grain size distributions in order for comparison with simulation. It was observed that grain growth stagnated after one hour annealing and that the grain size distributions were nearly, but not fully, self-similar. Grain size correlations showed that the gain area increases with the number of sides per gain and that small gains surround large gains and vice versa.; Monte Carlo computer simulation and curvature-driven growth by partial differentiation (PDE) techniques have been utilized to compare to the experimental gain size distributions mentioned above. It was shown that the comparisons with experimental distributions were not good. The experimental distributions reveal a significantly higher population of small gains compared with simulation. |
