Linking atomistic and mesoscale simulations of nanocrystalline materials: quantitative validation for the case of grain growth

Using grain growth in nanocrystalline palladium as a simple case study, we demonstrate how a novel mesoscale approach for simulating microstructural evolution in polycrystalline materials can be validated directly against atomic-level simulations of the same system. We first describe molecular dynamics simulations of grain growth in a columnar model microstructure. The atomic-level insights into the grain-growth mechanism gained from these simulations, particularly in the role of grain rotations, are captured theoretically for incorporation into the mesoscale approach, in which the objects evolving in space and time are the grain boundaries and grain junctions rather than the atoms. With all the input parameters to the mesoscale being physically well defined and obtained directly from the atomic-level simulations, the mesoscale simulations are fully prescribed. We find that the morphology of the mesoscale system evolves in an almost identical manner with that of the molecular dynamics simulation, demonstrating that the length- and time-scale linking has been performed correctly. When applied to systems containing large numbers of grains, the now validated mesoscale simulation approach allows the growth topology and long-time growth kinetics to be determined. As an outlook, we describe how the effects of applied stress can be incorporated.