While the above abstract sounds highly technical, this presentation is designed with the beginning graduate students in mind and won the 1996 Student-Faculty Colloquium Contest at the University of Maryland. Graduate students are encouraged to attend. Refreshments will be served beforehand. The Leslie models can be viewed as Poincare maps of systems of integral equations derived from the McKendrick PDEs. The straightforward approach does not work, and the problem must be carefully reformulated in order to make this connection.
Grain growth is driven by the reduction in positive interfacial energy.
Grain coarsening proceeds with only a change in length scale often measured as the average grain radius, R. Deterministic and stochastic models are used to describethe kinetics of grain growth. Numerous measurements, however, yield exponents less than 0.5. Grain boundary anisotropy is often invoked as an explanation for the discrepancy. Deterministic and stochastic computer simulations of two-dimensional grain growth show kinetics exponents smaller than 0.5. A recent stochastic model of grain growth which includes explicitly anisotropy predicts a slower kinetic with an exponent of 0.25.