David Fullwood; Madeline Foote; Akash Amalaraj, Brigham Young University
3D digital representations of experimentally characterized polycrystalline microstructures can be used to validate simulations, infer properties of microstructural constituents, and enable high-fidelity computational models to investigate materials phenomena and design materials with improved properties. Although such digital representations are already possible, current methods for their generation are time intensive and require the use of synchrotron radiation that can only be obtained at a few locations worldwide. For some types of microstructures, a newly developed characterization method called 3D surface microscopy has the ability to characterize all of the crystallographic degrees of freedom from 2D surface observations, and can be performed in standard electron microscopes that are available broadly. For through-thickness grained materials, full 3D microstructural reconstructions should therefore be possible with a great reduction in time and cost as compared to existing methods. To validate the accuracy of 3D surface microscopy measurements we collect EBSD scans from the top and bottom surfaces of polycrystalline metals, register the two scans, and assemble them into a full 3D digital representation of the microstructure, from which estimates of the grain boundary plane normals can be obtained (which are not available from traditional surface scanning techniques) The grain boundary normals obtained will then be compared to those measured using 3D surface microscopy on the same samples to estimate the accuracy of this new technique.