Classification of creep crack and cavitation sites in tempered martensite ferritic steel microstructures using MTEX toolbox for EBSD

Abstract

Tempered martensite ferritic steels exhibit a complex, hierarchical microstructure. Previous work has demonstrated the utility of electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis methods to classify crack and cavitation sites in terms of the substructural units and their boundaries. However, manual, interactive application of such methods is time consuming. The open-source MTEX toolbox for MATLAB allows scripting and automation of EBSD data analysis procedures. Here we present a validation of MTEX-based methods for identification of prior austenite grains, blocks and packets against the results of manual analysis for two example datasets, one exhibiting cracking and the other, cavitation.