Entropy decay during grain growth

Abstract

Materials with random microstructure are characterized by additional thermodynamic parameters, entropy and temperature of microstructure. It has been argued that there is one more law of thermodynamics: entropy of microstructure decays in isolated systems. In this paper, we check this assertion experimentally for the process of grain growth. We show that entropy of grain structure decays indeed as expected. We study also the equation of state for microstructure entropy. In general, microstructure entropy should be a function of microstructure energy and the average grain size. We observed that the equation of state degenerates, and there is a universal dependence of microstructure entropy on microstructure energy, at least at the stage of self similar grain growth.