In order to achieve a homogeneous starting material for the production of dense Si3N4 by post-sintering of RBSN, the morphological and chemical characteristics of the Si-starting powders as well as the pore structure of the Si-powder compacts have to be optimized. In this context, the influence of the grain size distribution on the micropore size distribution of the Sipowder compacts was determ...

Macroscopic properties of ferroelectrics are controlled by processes on the microscale, in particular switching crystal unit cells and movement domain walls, respectively. Besides these microscopic levels, grains a polycrystalline material constitute mesoscopic scale. Interactions with statistically distributed orientations, as consequence mechanical electrostatic mismatch, give rise to for exa...

Nanocrystalline (NC) metals with grain sizes <100 nm have attracted a lot of attention in the materials science fi eld for more than a few decades because of their ultra-high strength and hardness. Various experimental and computational studies indicate that dislocation-mediated plasticity prevails in NC metals when the grain size is larger than ~10 nm. Recent molecular dynamics (MD) simulation...

The underlying cause of stagnation of grain growth in thin metallic films remains a puzzle. Here it is re-visited by means of detailed comparison of experiments and simulations, using a broad range of metrics that, in addition to grain size, includes the number of sides and the average side class of nearest neighbors. The experimental grain size data reported is large and comprises nearly 35,00...

Biochar may improve soil hydrology by altering soil porosity, density, hydraulic conductivity, and water-holding capacity. These properties are associated with the grain size distributions of both soil and biochar, and therefore may change as biochar weathers. Here we report how freeze-thaw (F-T) cycling impacts the grain size of pine, mesquite, miscanthus, and sewage waste biochars under two d...