Conversion of EBSD data by a quaternion based algorithm to be used for grain structure simulations

Over the last decades, great progress has been made in developing models to describe and simulate the time-spatial evolution of microstructure in polycrystals. A major problem is to find suitable initial conditions to start such a simulation. One possibility to solve this problem is the usage of experimental data given by Electron Back Scattering Diffraction (EBSD) measurement. These technique provides the grain structure of a polycrystal in terms of Eulerian angles. In this work, we introduce a algorithm based on quaternions to describe the reconstruction of a polycrystal from the EBSD data in two and three space dimensions. We describe the EBSD measurement and the mathematical background in detail. From this we deduce the reconstruction algorithm and give some simulation results.