Inverse processing-structure relation for the nucleation and growth mechanism

The formation of realistic, polycrystalline microstructures can be simulated by modeling the kinetics of nucleation and growth. However, it is difficult to perform the inverse simulation, where details of the nucleation and growth process are inferred from geometric properties of the final microstructure. In the present study, we develop a methodology for solving the inverse problem for interface-limited growth in 1D, utilizing a reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) algorithm. The algorithm produces a time dependent nucleation rate that gives a grain size distribution closest to a target distribution. Its results may be used to understand the limitations of manipulating the grain boundary distributions through temperature alone.