The floating zone technique was employed to grow multicrystalline Si with controlled grain boundary configuration. Purposely designed bi-crystals were utilized as seed crystals to investigate the effect of the tilt angle from the perfect twin boundary on the growth behavior. When the growth was initiated from a bi-crystal with a Sigma 3 twin boundary, no particular change took place on the grain boundary configuration during growth. On the other hand, the decrease of the tilt angle during growth was observed when the growth was initiated from a bi-crystal with a tilted boundary from Sigma 3. This was accompanied by the appearance of new crystal grains. The reduction of the total interface energy would be a possible driving mechanism for this phenomenon. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.