Abstract
A common problem in analytical scanning electron microscopy (SEM) using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is the differentiation of phases with distinct chemistry but the same or very similar crystal structure. X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) is useful to help differentiate these phases of similar crystal structures but different elemental makeups. However, open, automated, and unbiased methods of differentiating phases of similar EBSD responses based on their EDS response are lacking. This paper describes a simple data analytics-based method, using a combination of singular value decomposition and cluster analysis, to merge simultaneously acquired EDS + EBSD information and automatically determine phases from both their crystal and elemental data. I use hexagonal TiB2 ceramic contaminated with multiple crystallographically ambiguous but chemically distinct cubic phases to illustrate the method. Code, in the form of a Python 3 Jupyter Notebook, and the necessary data to replicate the analysis are provided as Supplementary material.
Highlights
One of the most frustrating issues in electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is the inability of the analysis to differentiate between materials with the same or closely related crystal structures
Dynamical pattern simulation followed by dictionary comparison (Chen et al, 2015) provides very high fidelity in indexing, but is computationally expensive and has significant start-up effort involved
Detector vendors have vendor-specific methods for merging the EBSD and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) data to find the different phases. These methods can involve a certain amount of black box software and are not transferrable from one vendor’s system to another. These methods based on EDS elemental analysis (Nowell & Wright, 2004; Wright & Nowell, 2006; Nowell et al, 2011; Dietrich et al, 2014; Chiu et al, 2019) are effective, but they are ad hoc, dependent upon manually selected parameters, and are specific to the vendor of the detectors used in the experiment
Summary
OverviewOne of the most frustrating issues in electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is the inability of the analysis to differentiate between materials with the same or closely related crystal structures. Detector vendors have vendor-specific methods for merging the EBSD and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) data to find the different phases. These methods can involve a certain amount of black box software and are not transferrable from one vendor’s system to another. These methods based on EDS elemental analysis (Nowell & Wright, 2004; Wright & Nowell, 2006; Nowell et al, 2011; Dietrich et al, 2014; Chiu et al, 2019) are effective, but they are ad hoc, dependent upon manually selected parameters, and are specific to the vendor of the detectors used in the experiment. Other methods (i.e., Bilsland et al 2021) are very powerful, but solve more specific problems
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