Determination of the Minimum Scan Size to Obtain Representative Textures by Electron Backscatter Diffraction

A new method for analyzing microstructure is proposed to evaluate the long-range dependence of texture. The proposed method calculates the average disorientation as a function of distance between data points as measured by electron backscatter diffraction patterns. This method gives a measure of clustering of texture and is used to evaluate accurately the effective grain size. This procedure in conjunction with Information theory is used to estimate a representative scan size for various materials. Analyses show that the optimal scan size depends on grain morphology and crystallographic texture. The results also indicate that on an average the optimal scan size needs to be 10 times the effective grain size.