The microstructure stability during δ sub-solvus anneal-ing was investigated in Inconel 718 alloy. A reference dynamically recrystallized microstructure was produced through thermomechanical processing (torsion). The reference microstructure evolution during annealing was analyzed by EBSD (grain size, intragranular misorien-tation) and SEM (δ phase particles). Results confirm that, in the absence of stored energy, the grain struc-ture is controlled by the δ phase particles, as predicted by the Zener equation. If the reference microstructure is strained (ε < 0.1) before annealing, then stored en-ergy gradients between grains will induce selective grain growth leading to coarsening. The phenomenon is con-trolled by the balance of three forces (acting on bound-aries migration) having the same order of magnitude: capillarity, stored-energy and pinning forces. All these forces could be modeled in a single framework by the level set method. The first numerical results demon-strate the capability of the method to simulate 2D Zener pinning.