Correlation of grain boundary energy with boundary dislocation density

In the course of investigation about the misorientation dependence of grain boundary structure in materials with f.c.c. based structure, e.g. Al, TiC, Si, grain boundaries were found by high resolution electron microscopy to consist of arrays of lattice and DSC dislocations, and their densities varied continuously with misorientation irrespective of the nature of atomic bonding. The misorientation dependence of the lattice dislocation density agrees well with the dependence of boundary energy reported for Al by Otsuki and Mizuno. From this result, it is believed that the elastic energy of the boundary lattice dislocations is the main part of the boundary energy.