Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020
A thorough and complete assessment of microstructure of materials requires a wide variety of analytical techniques, which should be sensitive to at all length scales - from mms to atomic scale. While there have been rapid advances in imaging and spectroscopy techniques for microstructural analysis - at all length scales, techniques for crystallographic analysis of microstructure have primarily relied on bulk x-ray/neutron diffraction and TEM. X-ray and neutron diffraction techniques, though very powerful, are primarily bulk techniques and extraction of local crystallography is formidable if not impossible. On the other hand, TEM diffraction techniques provide precise crystallographic information, but at a much smaller length-scale and suffer from poor statistics and tedious specimen preparation procedures. With the advent of commercially available electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) and orientational imaging (OIM) systems for SEM, and sophisticated pattern recognition procedures, it is now possible to bridge the length-scale gap between bulk and TEM diffraction techniques.