Application of ODF to the Rietveld Profile Refinement of Polycrystalline Solid

Abstract

The Rietveld profile refinement method is probably the most popular technique used for the crystallographic characterization of materials including crystal structures and phase analysis, but it has been used mostly with ideal powder sample, not with textured polycrystals, because effects of strong and complex textures. Most technological materials are fabricated by using thermo-mechanical forming processes, which inevitably produce strong and complex preferential orientations of the crystallites. Consequently, the diffraction patterns of a given technological material are not unique but vary considerably with the measuring direction, with intensity variations as large as factors of hundreds, depending on the degree of texture. The texture effect on the diffraction pattern of a certain sample direction is directly proportional to the pole density of the corresponding inverse pole figure, which can be obtained from the three-dimensional orientation distribution function (ODF) of the material. The ODFs of materials with high crystal symmetry, such as cubic, hexagonal, tetragonal, and orthorhombic, can be determined quite precisely, using modern texture analysis techniques (for example, Bungel, Wenk, and Kallend et al.). The pole density distributions of the inverse pole figures can be used in the diffraction profile calculation of a highly textured sample.