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Polycrystalline tungsten is considered as an important material in aerospace, automobile, and energy industries due to its excellent thermal and mechanical properties. While grain boundaries (GBs) are perceived to play a major role in polycrystalline tungsten failure resistance, experimental data are scarce on explicit contribution of GBs to tungsten failure resistance. The present work focuses on understanding the effect of GB property variation on fracture resistance of polycrystalline tungsten. The cohesive finite element method is used for the simulation of crack propagation in polycrystalline tungsten microstructures. The results show a significant effect of GB property variation on change of crack propagation patterns during tungsten fracture. A variation of lO% in GB fracture energy resulted in distinctly different crack patterns with different primary crack propagation direction and the microcrack density. Based on the observed microstructural fracture attributes, a relation between cohesive energy dissipation and microcrack density in polycrystalline tungsten microstructures is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silicon carbide (SiC) is an important ceramic material usually found in polycrystalline form with grain boundary thickness ranging from a few nanometers to a few hundred nanometers and grains with multiple orientations with sizes of the order of few micrometers. The present work focuses on analyzing how the interplay between different orientations of SiC grains and different grain boundary thicknesses can be exploited for targeted improvement in the fracture resistance properties of SiC. Crack propagation simulations using the cohesive finite element method (CFEM) are pelformed on the finite element meshes developed on experimentally processed SiC morphologies. Analyses were performed at two different length scales: 300 µm x 60 µm (scale-l :Microscale) and 75 µm x 15 µm (scale-2 :Mesoscale). Lower resolution microstructure at scale-1 does not explicitly consider the presence of grain boundaries (GBs). Higher resolution microstructure at scale-2 explicitly models GBs. Results indicate that the effect of change in grain orientation is on crack path only. The fracture resistance is not significantly affected. The presence of GBs may directly aid in strengthening a microstructure's fracture resistance. However, indirectly it may weaken a microstructure by favoring the formation of microcracks. Significantly higher crack formation in grain interior while lower interfacial energy dissipation in comparison to interfaces indicates overall lower fracture strength of grain interiors in comparison to interfaces. If GBs are not accounted for, the second most influencing factor affecting fracture strength is the average grains size. Overall, it is mainly the GBs not the grain orientation distribution and grain size that significantly affects fracture strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]