GRAIN BOUNDARY ENERGY IN ICE: A ICE POLAR GRAIN GROWTH APLICATION

CARLOS LEONARDO DI PRINZIO; DRUETTA, ESTEBAN; DI PRINZIO, CARLOS LEONARDO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; SCAR XXXI & Open Science Conference; 2010

Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research

The size and shape of grains present in firn ice cores, is completely controlled by grain growth. Grain growth is affected by second phase particles like bubbles, volcanic traces and dust, and by the grain boundary energy and mobility anisotropy. At the present the quantitative effects of each one of these variables are not completely understood .Monte Carlo (MC) methods is proving to be a powerful tool particularly to study grain boundary migration and the effect of the anistropic grain boundary energy. However, experimental data of the ice grain boundary energy is very scarce. In this work, we measured the grain boundary energy in ice bicrystalline samples with different cristalline orientation and grain boundary inclination. We observed that the “special” grain boundary misorientations have low grain boundary energy. A MC algorithm in three dimensions (3D) polycrystalline samples is implemented to study the effect of the grain energy anisotropy on the grain growth. Initial condition similar to those observed in firn ice cores was used and the relative influence of the grain boundary energy drag on the firm ice grain growth is studied.