Abstract
Abstract This contribution reports on an experimental polishing procedure, that is comprised of early grinding in Al2O3 slurries and late polishing in colloidal silica, which is used for preparing the nitrided region of a plasma nitrided austenitic stainless steel, for crystallographic analysis via electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). The suitability of the polished surfaces for conducting EBSD characterization was assessed through an analysis of both the surface roughness (appraised by atomic force microscopy) and the quality of the Kikuchi diffraction patterns. We observed that as-nitrided virgin surfaces were not suitable for EBSD characterization, due to intense surface roughening, which was induced by the nitriding process itself. At the subsurface region, exposed by on-top mechanical polishing, the flatter nature of the polished surfaces allowed the acquisition of EBSD patterns with enough quality for microtexture analysis. A resolution of 100 nm in the total removed layer was attainable via careful control of the polishing parameters. Close parallelism between the polished and original surfaces was verified.
Highlights
Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) enables an assessment of the crystallographic orientation of microstructure in diverse alloys[1,2,3]
Via AFM, the difference of residual indentation depth between the final and initial surface for each polishing stage was assessed, and that was assumed as the thickness removed
It was observed that the thickness removed is around 15% of the thickness of the nitrided case (9.5 μm)
Summary
Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) enables an assessment of the crystallographic orientation of microstructure in diverse alloys[1,2,3]. EBSD characterization is performed in a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which is equipped with a system that is capable of registering and indexing Kikuchi diffraction patterns. Samples should be flat in a nanometer length, and substructures should have a moderate concentration of defects[11,12]. This hinders the EBSD characterization of diverse metallurgical structures. Samples with roughened surface topography could present not indexable EBSD patterns[15,16]
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