Crystallite

Polycrystalline structures composed of crystallites.

Clockwise from top left:
a) malleable iron
b) electrical steel without coating
c) solar cells made of multicrystalline silicon
d) galvanized surface of zinc
e) micrograph of acid etched metal highlighting
grain boundaries
A crystallite is a small or even
microscopic crystal which forms, for
example, during the cooling of many
materials. The orientation of crystallites
can be random with no preferred
direction, called random texture, or
directed, possibly due to growth and
processing conditions. Fiber texture is an
example of the latter. Crystallites are also
referred to as grains. The areas where
crystallites meet are known as grain
boundaries. Polycrystalline or
multicrystalline materials, or polycrystals
are solids that are composed of many
crystallites of varying size and
orientation.
Most inorganic solids are polycrystalline,
including all common metals, many
ceramics, rocks and ice. The extent to
which a solid is crystalline (crystallinity)
has important effects on its physical
properties.[1] Sulfur, while usually
polycrystalline, may also occur in other
allotropic forms with completely different
properties.[2] Although crystallites are
referred to as grains, powder grains are
different, as they can be composed of
smaller polycrystalline grains
themselves.[3]

While the structure of a (monocrystalline)

crystal is highly ordered and its lattice is
continuous and unbroken, amorphous
materials, such as glass and many
polymers, are non-crystalline and do not
display any structures as their
constituents are not arranged in an
ordered manner. Polycrystalline
structures and paracrystalline phases are
in between these two extremes.

Details
Different degrees of ordered structures: a
monocrystalline crystal, polycrystalline structure,
and amorphous or non-crystalline solid.

Crystal size is usually measured from X-

ray diffraction patterns and grain size by
other experimental techniques like
transmission electron microscopy. Solid
objects large enough to see and handle
are rarely composed of a single crystal,
except for a few cases (gems, silicon
single crystals for the electronics
industry, certain types of fiber, single
crystals of a nickel-based superalloy for
turbojet engines, and some ice crystals
which can exceed 0.5 meters in
diameter).[4] Most materials are
polycrystalline, made of a large number
of single crystals – crystallites – held
together by thin layers of amorphous
solid. The crystallite size can vary from a
few nanometers to several millimeters.

Bronze bell with large crystallites on the inside.

If the individual crystallites are oriented

completely at random, a large enough
volume of polycrystalline material will be
approximately isotropic. This property
helps the simplifying assumptions of
continuum mechanics to apply to real-
world solids. However, most
manufactured materials have some
alignment to their crystallites, resulting in
texture that must be taken into account
for accurate predictions of their behavior
and characteristics. When the crystallites
are mostly ordered with just some
random spread of orientations, one has a
mosaic crystal.

Material fractures can be either

intergranular or a transgranular fracture.
There is an ambiguity with powder
grains: a powder grain can be made of
several crystallites. Thus, the (powder)
"grain size" found by laser granulometry
can be different from the "grain size"
(rather, crystallite size) found by X-ray
diffraction (e.g. Scherrer method), by
optical microscopy under polarised light,
or by scanning electron microscopy
(backscattered electrons).

Coarse grained rocks are formed very

slowly, while fine grained rocks are
formed quickly, on geological time
scales. If a rock forms very quickly, such
as the solidification of lava ejected from
a volcano, there may be no crystals at all.
This is how obsidian forms.

Grain boundaries
Grain boundaries are interfaces where
crystals of different orientations meet. A
grain boundary is a single-phase
interface, with crystals on each side of
the boundary being identical except in
orientation. The term "crystallite
boundary" is sometimes, though rarely,
used. Grain boundary areas contain
those atoms that have been perturbed
from their original lattice sites,
dislocations, and impurities that have
migrated to the lower energy grain
boundary.

Treating a grain boundary geometrically

as an interface of a single crystal cut into
two parts, one of which is rotated, we see
that there are five variables required to
define a grain boundary. The first two
numbers come from the unit vector that
specifies a rotation axis. The third
number designates the angle of rotation
of the grain. The final two numbers
specify the plane of the grain boundary
(or a unit vector that is normal to this
plane).

Grain boundaries disrupt the motion of

dislocations through a material.
Dislocation propagation is impeded
because of the stress field of the grain
boundary defect region and the lack of
slip planes and slip directions and overall
alignment across the boundaries.
Reducing grain size is therefore a
common way to improve strength, often
without any sacrifice in toughness
because the smaller grains create more
obstacles per unit area of slip plane. This
crystallite size-strength relationship is
given by the Hall-Petch relationship. The
high interfacial energy and relatively
weak bonding in grain boundaries makes
them preferred sites for the onset of
corrosion and for the precipitation of new
phases from the solid.

Grain boundary migration plays an

important role in many of the
mechanisms of creep. Grain boundary
migration occurs when a shear stress
acts on the grain boundary plane and
causes the grains to slide. This means
that fine-grained materials actually have
a poor resistance to creep relative to
coarser grains, especially at high
temperatures, because smaller grains
contain more atoms in grain boundary
sites. Grain boundaries also cause
deformation in that they are sources and
sinks of point defects. Voids in a material
tend to gather in a grain boundary, and if
this happens to a critical extent, the
material could fracture.

During grain boundary migration, the rate

determining step depends on the angle
between two adjacent grains. In a small
angle dislocation boundary, the migration
rate depends on vacancy diffusion
between dislocations. In a high angle
dislocation boundary, this depends on
the atom transport by single atom jumps
from the shrinking to the growing
grains.[5]

Grain boundaries are generally only a few

nanometers wide. In common materials,
crystallites are large enough that grain
boundaries account for a small fraction
of the material. However, very small grain
sizes are achievable. In nanocrystalline
solids, grain boundaries become a
significant volume fraction of the
material, with profound effects on such
properties as diffusion and plasticity. In
the limit of small crystallites, as the
volume fraction of grain boundaries
approaches 100%, the material ceases to
have any crystalline character, and thus
becomes an amorphous solid.

Grain boundaries are also present in

magnetic domains in magnetic
materials. A computer hard disk, for
example, is made of a hard
ferromagnetic material that contains
regions of atoms whose magnetic
moments can be realigned by an
inductive head. The magnetization varies
from region to region, and the
misalignment between these regions
forms boundaries that are key to data
storage. The inductive head measures
the orientation of the magnetic moments
of these domain regions and reads out
either a “1” or “0”. These bits are the data
being read. Grain size is important in this
technology because it limits the number
of bits that can fit on one hard disk. The
smaller the grain sizes, the more data
that can be stored.

Because of the dangers of grain

boundaries in certain materials such as
superalloy turbine blades, great
technological leaps were made to
minimize as much as possible the effect
of grain boundaries in the blades. The
result was directional solidification
processing in which grain boundaries
were eliminated by producing columnar
grain structures aligned parallel to the
axis of the blade, since this is usually the
direction of maximum tensile stress felt
by a blade during its rotation in an
airplane. The resulting turbine blades
consisted of a single grain, improving
reliability.

Generally, polycrystals cannot be

superheated; they will melt promptly
once they are brought to a high enough
temperature. This is because grain
boundaries are amorphous, and serve as
nucleation points for the liquid phase. By
contrast, if no solid nucleus is present as
a liquid cools, it tends to become
supercooled. Since this is undesirable for
mechanical materials, alloy designers
often take steps against it. See grain
refinement.

See also
Abnormal grain growth
Crystallization of polymers
Crystallography
Microlite
Polycrystalline silicon

Footnotes
1. Purdue University Categories of Solids
2. C.Michael Hogan. 2011. Sulfur
Archived October 28, 2012, at the
Wayback Machine.. Encyclopedia of Earth,
eds. A.Jorgensen and C.J.Cleveland,
National Council for Science and the
environment, Washington DC
3. Definition of polycrystalline graphite
4. J. R. Petit, R. Souchez, N. I. Barkov, V.
Ya. Lipenkov, D. Raynaud, M. Stievenard,
N. I. Vassiliev, V. Verbeke, and F. Vimeux
(10 December 1999). "More Than
200 Meters of Lake Ice Above Subglacial
Lake Vostok, Antarctica". Science. 286
(5447): 2138–41.
doi:10.1126/science.286.5447.2138 .
PMID 10591641 .
5. R.D. Doherty et al., Current issues in
recrystallization: a review , Materials
Science and Engineering A238 (1997), p.
222 (Access to the article for subscribers
only)

References
Allen, Samuel and Thomas, Edwin. The
Structure of Materials. New York: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1999.
Jiles, David. Introduction to Magnetism
and Magnetic Materials. London:
Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1998.

Further reading
Lau, J. (2009). "Implementation of
Two-Dimensional Polycrystalline
 Grains in Object Oriented
Micromagnetic Framework" (PDF).
Journal of Research of the National
Institute of Standards and Technology.
National Institute of Science and
Technology. 114 (1): 57.
doi:10.6028/jres.114.005 .

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