Measurement of boundary plane inclination in a scanning electron microscope

Abstract

Recently, a method has been devised for measuring the boundary orientations using backscattered Kikuchi diffraction (BKD, otherwise known as electron backscattering, EBS). The work reported demonstrates that BKD can be efficiently used to measure both the misorientation across grain boundaries and also the orientation of boundary planes. In nickel it has been shown that the boundaries of grains which are situated along the corner of a rectangular specimen rotate so as to minimize their interfacial energy. For non-coincidence site lattices related grains, boundaries tend to align normal to the edge of the specimen, while {Sigma} = 3 and {Sigma} = 9 CSLs tend to rotate to tilt configuration, particularly asymmetric tilts such as {l brace}111{r brace}/ {l brace}115{r brace} or {l brace}110{r brace}/{l brace}114{r brace}.