Crystal c-axis mapping of hcp metals by conventional reflected polarized light microscopy: Application to untextured and textured cp-Titanium

Nowadays the crystallographic characterization of polycrystalline metals and metallic alloys is usually performed by means of the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique. However, when dealing with coarse structures presenting intrinsic optical anisotropy, polarized light microscopy (PLM) imaging might be an alternative or a complementary time-efficient technique. Accordingly, a new computer-aided methodology has been developed in the present study and successfully applied on the crystal c-axis characterization of a hexagonal close-packed (hcp) structure, alpha commercial pure-Titanium (cp-Ti). In this sense, the correlation between EBSD-based crystallographic parameters and PLM-based parameters under certain light microscope settings has been first established by direct comparison using a representative amount of random orientations. Finally, PLM-based c-axis mapping and subsequent c-axis texture plotting have been performed and validated with EBSD for untextured and textured cp-Ti.