| Abstract Scope |
Combining innovations in stress-strain measurement with those in optical metallography in the second half of the 19th century enabled scientists to investigate the softening that occurred during annealing of metals after forging, a phenomenon known to blacksmiths for perhaps thousands of years, but which did not yet have a satisfactory physical explanation. By 1900, it had been determined that many crystallites impinging upon one another comprised metallic microstructures, and that “grain size” had important implications for material properties. This talk will trace the discovery of grain coarsening from the epiphany that it was distinct from recrystallization, through early phenomenological models constructed from the observation that boundaries migrated in their direction of curvature, Zener’s derivation of pinning effects, the statistical-numerical models of Abbruzzese & Lücke, and finally to developments in the past 4 decades in understanding the role of topology on self-similarity of the grain size distribution during grain growth. |