Electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD)
EBSD Grain Orientation Mapping
Electron Backscattered Diffraction (EBSD) is a surface sensitive diffraction technique which is used to measure and display the crystalline orientation and phase of a material. This technique is often used for understanding the microstructure and texture of a material as a function of processing. EBSD is the industry standard for analyzing 3D printed metal parts.
In order to form an EBSD grain orientation map, hundreds of thousands to millions of Kikuchi diffraction patterns are collected. A unique color is assigned to each crystalline orientation and by displaying all of the data the end result is a colored map showing crystalline orientation with clear distinction between individual grains.
Large Area Montaging
Our EBSD detector is a Hikari Super camera manufactured by EDAX. This high sensitivity detector is capable of collecting over 1,000 EBSD patterns per second. Our software is also equipped with montaging capabilities which means we can stitch together hundreds of individual maps to create a single large field of view EBSD map. Montaging is critical as most parts being analyzed are larger than what can be scanned in a single field of view. The example on the right is a large area montage taken from 30 individual fields of view and stitched into a single dataset.
Phase Mapping
Because EBSD is directly measuring the crystal structure of the material, the technique can also display phase maps and give detailed information on average grain size and area fraction of each phase. The image to the right is an EBSD phase map of a duplex stainless steel. In this case the blue phase is ferrite which has a body centered cubic (BCC) crystalline structure while the red phase is austenite which has a face-centered cubic (FCC) structure.