Large scale numerical simulation of microstructural evolution in elastically stressed solids

We perform large scale numerical simulations of particle coarsening in an e lastically anisotropic system. The system we consider is composed of cohere nt misfitting second phase particles. In this case the excess energy of the system is given by a sum of the interfacial and elastic energies, and the interfaces move by the flow of mass through the matrix in order to reduce t he excess energy. We employ efficient computational methods which allow us to study very large systems. The simulations are started using circular par ticles randomly placed in a computational cell. During coarsening the parti cles change their shapes from circles to fourfold symmetric shapes to twofo ld symmetric shapes. In addition, the particles tend to align along [100] d irections due to the configurational forces generated by other particles. T he radial distribution functions are computed to obtain quantitative inform ation about the anisotropic evolution of the microstructures. (C) 2000 Else vier Science S.A. All rights reserved.