Reply to comments on “Unexplored Topics and Potentials of Grain Boundary Engineering”, [Scripta Materialia, 54 (2006) 1041–1045]

In a reply to our original paper, Kirchheim criticized what we considered the conditions for a stable grain size, suggesting that our conclusions are only correct for ‘open’ systems. We show here that a ‘closed’ system will only behave stably in the case of hypothetical negative grain boundary energy. By contrast we prove that for positive grain boundary energy a stable grain size can be attained in the case of negative adsorption.