Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) in SEM is a powerful technique. Unfortunately it has the reputation to be difficult in use and interpretation. Moreover, obviously several limitations or rules exist. Some of them are real, but many of them belong to the realm of myths.
What you would like to do more efficient or in general with EBSD? Where do you see the major potential in future?
We are using a lot the EBSD technique to characterize the microstructures of new and futur advanced high strength steels.
We can imagine a lot of fancy stuff that could really help us (reference free stress measurement, easy strain field measurement...) but regarding more 'industrial' applications, I would say that the automatic differentiation of ferrite, bainite and martensite could be a real benefit. Actually, we are using mainly manual thresholding methods based on quality index, band slope, KAM....to separate these phases in a microstruture. In know that it is a chanllenging topic as the crystallography differences between these phases could be very small, but the potential benefit of such development could be a major asset for all the characterization of advanced high strength steels!
I used to study the microstructure, phase and texture of advanced high strength steels, such as DP/TRIP/TWIP. etc. The one of purpose of these studies is mainly to clarify or differentiate the phase category (scuh as ferrite, bainite and martensite),volume ratio and texture. Because these information acquired from EBDS related significantly to their mechanical property (strength and elongation) of the advanced high strength steel (AHS). A large area EBSD mapping (>50 um in scale) technique ( transmission EBSD is an active development for us) is quite profitable for crystallographic identity. This is different with TEM observation which is limited by several micrometer in scale. On the other hand, a quantitative analysis is probably superior to TEM. I think that these above described are major potential in future. Above suggestions thanks.
Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is conducted using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) equipped with an EBSD detector. EBSP is formed when many different planes diffract different electrons to form Kikuchi bands which correspond to each of the lattice diffracting planes. It has been used to find crystal orientation of the material and can be used to examine micro-texture and growth morphology. Maps describe grain orientation, grain boundary, diffraction pattern image. Numbers and percentages of grains and grain areas within different ranges of grain size are easily extracted and quality can be identified. Various statistical tools are used to measure the average disorientation, grain size, and crystallographic texture. Therefore crystal quality could be determined. Material quality has been also assessed by fully automated defect recognition microscopy (DRM) that enables crystallographic defect structures / dislocation (etch pits) and growth morphology to be mapped. EBSD can be used to index and identify the crystal systems, applied to crystal orientation mapping, defect studies, phase identification, grain boundary and morphology studies, regional heterogeneity investigations, material discrimination, microstrain mapping.
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