The formed microstructure inside polycrystalline materials strongly influences their practical performances, which process is mostly dominated by grain growth behaviors. However, the general evolution of grain growth behaviors, especial for the occurrence of abnormal grain growth and stagnant growth, remains ambiguous despite decades of efforts. Here, we investigate systematically the general evolution of grain growth behaviors by combining a new grain growth theory with grain growth experiments in SrTiO₃ polycrystalline materials. The results demonstrate that the observed evolution of grain growth behaviors is in accord with the theoretical predictions, which reveals that the abnormal and stagnant behaviors of grain growth may intrinsically occur in polycrystalline systems due to the existence of non-zero step free energy for grain growth. Furthermore, the general growth theory reveals that normal grain growth results from the roughening transition of grain boundaries which corresponding to step free energy equal to zero. Besides the lower GB energy as commonly believed, the narrower grain size distribution is revealed to play an important role on the thermal stability of grains, which may lead to the counter-intuitive phenomenon of smaller nano-sized grains with higher thermal stability as recently reported in the literature. The general, quantitative growth theory may offer an accurate guidance for the microstructural design with optimal physical properties in polycrystalline materials.

多晶材料内部形成的微观结构强烈影响其实际性能，该过程主要由晶粒生长行为主导。然而，尽管经过数十年的努力，晶粒生长行为的一般演变，特别是异常晶粒生长和停滞生长的发生，仍然不明确。在这里，我们通过将新的晶粒生长理论与 SrTiO _{3 中的}晶粒生长实验相结合，系统地研究了晶粒生长行为的一般演变多晶材料。结果表明，观察到的晶粒生长行为的演变与理论预测一致，表明由于晶粒生长的非零阶跃自由能的存在，晶粒生长的异常和停滞行为可能在多晶系统中固有地发生。 . 此外，一般的生长理论表明，正常的晶粒生长是由晶界的粗化转变引起的，这对应于等于零的阶跃自由能。除了通常认为的较低的 GB 能量外，较窄的晶粒尺寸分布对晶粒的热稳定性也起着重要作用，这可能导致最近报道的具有较高热稳定性的较小纳米晶粒的反直觉现象在文献中。一般，