Talk
On the Topology of Steel
Abstract
Polycrystalline materials, such as metals, are composed of crystal grains of varying size and shape. Typically, the occurring grain cells have the combinatorial types of 3-dimensional simple polytopes, and together they tile 3-dimensional space.
We will see that some of the occurring grain types are substantially more frequent than others - where the frequent types turn out to be "combinatorially round". Here, the classification of grain types gives us, as an application of combinatorial low-dimensional topology, a new starting point for a topological microstructure analysis of steel.