Grain boundary and particle interaction: Enveloping and pass-through mechanisms studied by 3D phase field crystal simulations

[Display omitted] •Grain boundary and particle interaction is studied by the phase field crystal method.•Novel details on grain boundary passage by particle cutting are provided.•Grain boundary retardation is found to be stronger for coherent particles.•The highest drag force occurs at the switching point between the two mechanisms. Grain boundary interaction with second-phase particles having different degrees of coherency is investigated using the phase field crystal (PFC) method. Both the enveloping and pass-through mechanisms are studied with regards to grain boundary pressure, passage time and interface evolution. It is found that coherent particles exert a stronger retardation effect on grain boundaries compared to incoherent particles, with regards to both pressure and time, but also that this benefit is limited to a small range of misfit values. The simulations also show that the mobility is not a constant during particle passage, as commonly assumed, which means that grain boundary pressure cannot easily be extracted from the grain boundary velocity. Furthermore, the complex evolution of the pass-through mechanism and the transient behavior for intermediate coherencies is also investigated. The highest drag force is found to occur at the switching point between enveloping and pass-through. As part of the study, the advantages of using PFC for this type of analyses are also highlighted.