The five-parameter grain boundary curvature distribution in an austenitic and ferritic steel

Abstract The distribution of grain boundary curvatures as a function of five independent crystallographic parameters is measured in an austenitic and a ferritic steel. Both local curvatures and integral mean curvatures are measured from three dimensional electron backscattered diffraction data. The method is first validated on ideal shapes. When applied to real microstructures, it is found that the grain boundary mean curvature varies with the boundary crystallography and is more sensitive to the grain boundary plane orientation than to the disorientation. The grain boundaries with the smallest curvatures also have low grain boundary energy and large relative areas. The results also show that the curvature is influenced by the grain size and by the number of nearest neighbors. For austenite, when the number of faces on a grain is equal to the average number of faces of its neighbors, it has zero integral mean curvature.