On the coarsening of gas-filled pores in solids

An analytical study is presented of the asymptotic coarsening kinetics of both monatomic and diatomic-gas-filled pores in solids, the rate-controlling process being assumed to be the volume diffusion of gas atoms within the host solid. It is shown that the asymptotic size-distribution functions can be expressed in terms of appropriate similarity transformations, and exact expressions are derived for both the frequency and cumulative distributions for each of the two cases considered. The fact that the order in size between pores is maintained as coarsening proceeds is used, together with the cumulative distribution functions, to derive expressions which describe the temporal evolution of individual pores. The behavior of gross properties of the pore distributions, such as pore concentration, mean radius, and volume fraction is also evaluated.