Fast simulation of grain growth based on Orientated Tessellation Updating Method

This work is part of a more general idea consisting in developing a macroscopic model of grain growth whose state variables contain for each material point the statistical descriptors of the microstructure (e.g., disorientation, grain size and shape distributions). The strategy is to determine macroscopic free energy and dissipation potentials on the basis of a large number of computations at the scale of the polycrystal. The aim is to determine enriched macroscopic evolution laws. For sake of simplicity, this contribution only deals with grain growth of a single phased metal without diffusion or segregation of alloying elements. In order to test this upscaling strategy it is necessary to establish a simulation tool at the scale of the polycrystal. It should be sufficiently simple and fast to enable a large number of simulations of various microstructures, even if it leads to neglect some phenomena occurring at this scale. Usual grain growth models relying on mobile finite element modeling, level set functions, phase field or molecular dynamics are too computationally costly to be used within the proposed framework. Therefore, this paper focuses on the development of a "toy"model. Tessellation techniques are usually used to approximate polycrystalline microstructures. Therefore, one can approximate the real evolution of the microstructure as a succession of tessellation approximations. It then becomes quite natural to attempt to establish the evolution law of the microstructure directly on the parameters defining the tessellation. The obtained model is very light in terms of computational cost and enables to compute a large number of evolutions within the framework of the proposed statistical upscaling method.