Elastic wave propagation in textured polycrystalline materials: A computationally-efficient and experimentally-supported approach

Abstract

In this study, a computationally efficient and experimentally supported approach has been introduced in order to simulate the elastic wave propagation in polycrystalline materials, primarily for investigating the influence of texture intensity on the wave’s group velocity. To this end, synthetic microstructures were generated using a voxel-based software, with systematically varying texture intensities, guided by both analytical inputs and experimentally derived Euler angles from deformed and annealed copper samples. A key novelty of this methodology is the use of a reduced set of the most frequently occurring Euler angles, each assigned a weight, which preserves the texture characteristics while significantly reducing computational demand. To isolate the influence of grain orientation, grain size distribution was kept constant across all cases. Time-domain wave propagation studies were then performed in a commercially available finite element solver to analyse wave behaviour. The results demonstrated that increasing texture intensity in two different texture conditions, namely Cube {001} $〈100〉$ and Copper {112}$〈111〉$, shows a reduction in grain boundary scattering, and a gradual shift in group velocity between isotropic and single crystal bound. For a practical scenario, microstructures containing multiple texture components were also investigated, revealing an intermediate velocity between the two bounds, which facilitates recognizing the presence of weak or strong texture in a material. This integrative and resource-optimized approach not only strengthens the understanding of elastic wave behaviour at the micron-scale, but also contributes towards advancing the non-destructive characterization of crystallographic texture.