Polycrystals

A crystallite is a small or even microscopic crystal which forms, for example, during the cooling of many materials. The orientation of crystallites can be random with no preferred direction, called random texture, or directed, possibly due to growth and processing conditions. Fiber texture is an example of the latter. Crystallites are also referred to as grains. The areas where crystallite grains meet are known as grain boundaries. Polycrystalline or multicrystalline materials, or polycrystals are solids that are composed of many crystallites of varying size and orientation.

Most inorganic solids are polycrystalline, including all common metals, many ceramics, rocks and ice. The extent to which a solid is crystalline (crystallinity) has important effects on its physical properties.Sulfur, while usually polycrystalline, may also occur in other allotropic forms with completely different properties. Although crystallites are referred to as grains, powder grains are different, as they can be composed of smaller polycrystalline grains themselves.

While the structure of a (monocrystalline) crystal is highly ordered and its lattice is continuous and unbroken, amorphous materials, such as glass and many polymers, are non-crystalline and do not display any structures as their constituents are not arranged in an ordered manner. Polycrystalline structures and paracrystalline phases are in between these two extremes.

Crystal size is usually measured from X-ray diffraction patterns and grain size by other experimental techniques like transmission electron microscopy. Solid objects that are large enough to see and handle are rarely composed of a single crystal, except for a few cases (gems, silicon single crystals for the electronics industry, certain types of fiber, single crystals of a nickel-based superalloy for turbojet engines, and some ice crystals which can exceed 0.5 meters in diameter). Most materials are polycrystalline; they are made of a large number of single crystals – crystallites – held together by thin layers of amorphous solid. The crystallite size can vary from a few nanometers to several millimeters.

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