Statistics and Reproducibility of Grain Morphologies and Crystallographic Orientations Mapped by Laboratory Diffraction Contrast Tomography

Abstract

Laboratory diffraction contrast tomography (LabDCT) enables a user to reconstruct 3D grain maps of polycrystalline materials non-destructively. For each grain, the morphology and crystallographic orientation, as well as derived properties such as grain boundary properties can be determined. Through two application examples this paper demonstrates the capabilities and potential of the current LabDCT implementation. Firstly, for well-annealed grain structures the reproducibility of LabDCT for more than 95% of the grains was found to be 5 μm on grain center-of-mass positions and 0.02° on orientations, while 90% of the grain boundary locations are determined with an accuracy better than 4 μm. The second example highlights the available statistics on thousands of grains, as well as the complementarity between LabDCT and absorption contrast tomography, readily available due to the integration of LabDCT on a commercial X-ray microscope.