Multi-phase field modeling and simulation of magnetically driven grain boundary migration in SmCo polycrystals

Abstract

There is a growing demand for magnetic materials straight forward in wind turbines and electric motors. Their functional properties depend critically on their microstructure and thus on the microstructure evolution during sintering or heat treatment. Field-assisted selective grain growth allows to optimize the microstructure. However, the simultaneous modeling of the structural and magnetic degrees of freedom on the micrometer scale is not possible with most simulation packages. Therefore, we extend the open-source software project OpenPhase and implement the micromagnetic equations needed to treat both degrees of freedom in the framework of the multi-phase field method. We apply our model to the field-assisted grain growth in Sm2Co17 polycrystal films.