Three-Dimensional Modeling of the Grain Growth by Coalescence in the Initial Stage of Liquid Phase Sintering

A Monte Carlo method was developed to simulate the three-dimensional grain growth by coalescence in the initial stage of liquid phase sintering. The simulated grain, including a cluster of bonded particles, was treated in an appropriate three-dimensional multi-particle arrangement of the powder compact, and each cluster was assumed to be coalesced to reduce the system energy. The probability model also incorporated the energy-misorientation relationship assigned to randomly generated neighboring particles. Simulation results indicate that the size distribution of agglomerated particles are broadened by either an increase in the standard deviation of particle size distributions or a decrease in the volume fraction of the liquid, mainly due to the increasing of the probability of particle contacts. The findings of the simulation are favorably compared with past experimental observations on W–Ni–Fe alloys.