Thermal Grooving Simulations

In this note, we present simulations on thermal grooving for both porous and non-porous media. A bar with grains is allowed to anneal by means of grain growth and surface diffusion. In the case of porous media, this can be seen as a follow-up of the previous sintering simulations, but with a free boundary.

Parameters used throughout this note are the same as in this post. As an initial configuration, uniform, rectangular grains were placed in the domain. The system was then annealed for approximately 5000 seconds. Here are the initial and final configurations:

Here is a movie of the simulation:

The movie may be downloaded here.

The simulation was performed in 77,528,418,542 Monte Carlo steps. CPU time information could not be obtained because the simulations were terminated early.

Porous media

We may perform the same simulation, but with porous material. This is like the sintering simulations performed before, but with a free boundary. The initial profile is generated by a random sphere packing algorithm so that material occurs at 80% density. The system was then annealed for 10,000 seconds. Here is are the initial and final configurations:

Here is a movie of the simulation:

The movie can be downloaded here.

Here are the number of grains and average grain size as a function of simulation time:

The simulation took 177,233,044,834 billion steps and 216749 CPU seconds.