Handling Misalignment and Drift in 3D EBSD Data Sets

GE Global Research is exploring the 3D reconstruction of high temperature materials to understand material behavior in lifing applications. Large volumes of material are required to generate the appropriate statistical understanding of grain morphologies, grain boundary types and distributions, and residual plastic strain. Consequently, GE has adopted mechanical sectioning coupled with EBSD analysis as the methodology for investigating regions of interest. Among the major factors that affect the accuracy of such a reconstruction are thermal or mechanical drift during EBSD measurements and the precision and accuracy of sample alignment. To correct for these unavoidable issues when reconstructing the final volume, an algorithm based on grain center-of-mass and various shape factors has been developed and applied to a data set. Results show a significant improvement in slice-to-slice registration.