On the growth of grains

Abstract The present paper is a development of the unified model for growth of cellular microstructures proposed by Humphreys. This development aims at taking into consideration the effects of an inhomogeneous distribution of the stored energy. It allows the local energy around a given cell to deviate from the mean field value, a situation which can occur when the local space-filling configuration differs from the average. The expression for the rate of grain growth is derived locally by focusing on the first layer of neighbours only.