Inversion methodology for ultrasonic characterization of polycrystals with clusters of preferentially oriented grains.

Titanium alloys are widely used in the aerospace industry. However, due to presence of microtexture, which is characterized by preferred crystallographic orientation clustering of thousands of alpha crystallites, cold dwell fatigue may significantly reduce the part life. To satisfy the practical need for nondestructive microtexture characterization, an inverse ultrasonic methodology is proposed to quantify mean parameters of microtexture regions (MTRs) having ellipsoidal shapes. One limitation of previous model-based ultrasonic inversion methods is required knowledge of elastic constants of the crystallites, which are rarely available for engineering alloys. This study overcomes this constraint by adopting the far field attenuation model, JASA, 137 (5), 2655-2669 (2015), and the backscattering model for ultrasonic wave interaction with microtexture. In the methodology developed, all necessary averaged MTR characteristics are obtained solely from directional ultrasonic measurements (backscattering, attenuation, and velocity) without a prior knowledge of material microstructures or elastic properties of different material phases. The inversion method is illustrated by simulations. To support the inversion methodology, the mean MTR sizes, morphology, and elastic scattering factors are determined from the ultrasonic experiment on a Ti-6242 alloy sample. The inversion results are compared with destructive electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis from which the MTRs are segmented using a non-contiguous grouping criteria. Good agreement is found.

Impulse excitation scanning acoustic microscopy for local quantification of Rayleigh surface wave velocity using B-scan analysis.

A new technique for performing quantitative scanning acoustic microscopy imaging of Rayleigh surface wave (RSW) velocity was developed based on b-scan processing. In this technique, the focused acoustic beam is moved through many defocus distances over the sample and excited with an impulse excitation, and advanced algorithms based on frequency filtering and the Hilbert transform are used to post-process the b-scans to estimate the Rayleigh surface wave velocity. The new method was used to estimate the RSW velocity on an optically flat E6 glass sample, and the velocity was measured at ±2 m/s and the scanning time per point was on the order of 1.0 s, which are both improvement from the previous two-point defocus method. The new method was also applied to the analysis of two titanium samples, and the velocity was estimated with very low standard deviation in certain large grains on the sample. A new behavior was observed with the b-scan analysis technique where the amplitude of the surface wave decayed dramatically on certain crystallographic orientations. The new technique was also compared with previous results, and the new technique has been found to be much more reliable and to have higher contrast than previously possible with impulse excitation.

3D reconstruction of prior ß grains in friction stir-processed Ti-6Al-4V.

The prior ß grain structure and orientations in the central stir zone of friction stir-processed Ti-6Al-4V were reconstructed from measured α phase orientations obtained by three-dimensional serial sectioning in a dual-beam focused ion beam scanning electron microscope. The data were processed to obtain the α colony and ß grain size distributions in the volume. Several ß grains were individually analysed to determine the total number of unique α variants and the respective volume fractions of each. The analysis revealed that some grains experienced overwhelming variant selection (i.e. one variant dominated) whereas other ß grains contained a more evenly distributed mixture of all 12 variants.

Using cross-correlation for automated stitching of two-dimensional multi-tile electron backscatter diffraction data.

A method for automatically aligning consecutive data sets of large, two-dimensional multi-tile electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) scans with high accuracy was developed. The method involved first locating grain and phase boundaries within search regions containing overlapping data in adjacent scan tiles, and subsequently using cross-correlation algorithms to determine the relative position of the individual scan tiles which maximizes the fraction of overlapping boundaries. Savitzky-Golay filtering in two dimensions was used to estimate the background, which was then subtracted from the cross-correlation to enhance the peak signal in samples with a high density of interfaces. The technique was demonstrated on data sets with a range of interface densities. The equations were implemented as enhancements to a recently published open source code for stitching of multi-tile EBSD data sets.

A novel method for acquiring large-scale automated scanning electron microscope data.

Recent software and hardware advances in the field of electron backscatter diffraction have led to an increase in the rate of data acquisition. Combining automated stage movements with conventional beam control have allowed researchers to collect data from significantly larger areas of samples than was previously possible. This paper describes a LabVIEW™ and AutoIT(©) code which allows for increased flexibility compared to commercially available software. The source code for this software has been made available in the online version of this paper.

AnyStitch: a tool for combining electron backscatter diffraction data sets.

Recent advances in electron backscatter diffraction equipment and software have permitted increased data acquisition rates on the order of hundreds of points per second with additional increases in the foreseeable future likely. This increase in speed allows users to collect data from statistically significant areas of samples by combining beam-control scans and automated stage movements. To facilitate data analysis, however, the individual tiles must be combined, or stitched, into a single data set. In this paper, we describe a matlab(®) (The Mathworks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA) program to facilitate stitching of electron backscatter diffraction data. The method offers users a wide range of controls for tile placement including independent overlaps for horizontal and vertical tiles and also includes a parameter to account for systematic stage positioning errors or improperly calibrated scan rotation. The code can stitch data collected on either square or hexagonal grids and contains a function to reduce the resolution of square grid data if the resulting file is too large (or has too many grains) to be opened by the analysis software. The software was primarily written to work with TSL(®) OIM™ data sets and includes a function to quickly read compressed *.osc files into a variable in the matlab(®) workspace as opposed to using slower, text-reading functions. The output file is in *.ang format and can be opened directly by TSL(®) OIM™ Analysis software. A set of functions to facilitate stitching of text-based *.ctf files produced by Oxford Instruments HKL systems are also included. Finally, the code can also be used to combine *.tif images to produce a montage. The source code, a graphical user interface and a compiled version of the software was made available in the online version of this paper.