3D mapping of macrozones in Ti alloy using texture tomography

Ti alloys are known to develop spatially varying, distinct crystallographic textures over macroscopic material volumes as a result of thermo-mechanical processing. The presence of these so-called macrozones and associated variability of mechanical properties can lead to premature failure in critical engineering applications. So far, the characterization of 3D local texture can only be tested with destructive methods based on repeated EBSD characterization.
Here we propose to map the local texture in 10 mm^3 sized volumes of two commonly used Ti alloys, known to contain macrozones spanning several hundreds of µm using the wide angle (WAXS) extension of the tensor tomography methodology, initially established for small angle scattering (SAXS) and bio-materials. Two different reconstruction approaches (hyperspherical harmonics) versus regular sampling of orientation space will be evaluated against each other, and the results will be cross-validated against serial sectionning and EBSD.