Topology characteristics of three-dimensional grains in polycrystalline materials

The quantitative microstructural analysis in recrystallized pure iron is carried out by serial sectioning experiment coupled with three-dimensional (3-D) grain reconstruction technique. The full 3-D morphology of 16254 pure iron grains, which is the largest experimental 3-D grain dataset to date, is obtained. It is shown that the peak and the mean of the grain face number distribution were 10 and 13.5, respectively. For individual grains, the average trends that the highest and lowest face classes exhibited the highest affinity for mutual contact but the lowest affinity for contact with themselves are experimentally confirmed by 3-D pure iron grains. The pure iron grains are observed to have much more three-edged faces than Monte Carlo grains, resulting in relatively higher average dispersions of the grain edge distribution.