Impact of boundary nucleation on product grain size distribution

We examine quantitatively the impact of boundary nucleation on the size distribution of product grains in a computer simulation of a two-dimensional phase transformation. This is accomplished by determining the probability distribution of product grain areas under different nucleation conditions. Specifically, a comparison of the moments of normalized area distributions of product grains arising from site-biased nuclei with the corresponding moments of the area distribution of Voronoi grains reveals those spatial features of the collection of catalytic sites which most affect product microstructure. The impact of other relevant length scales, including the square root of the inverse nucleation site density, the lattice parameter, and the system size, on microstructure is also discussed.