Other third-party EBSD softwareΒΆ

Apart from commercial software, there are several third-party software that can be found for post-processing of EBSD mappings using the different output files of commercial software. A quick overview of these software and their applications is detailed in this section.

VMAP designed by Humphreys [Humphreys2004] is available upon request. It is a complement to the HKL post-treatment software. Orientation maps, pole figures, identification of high and low angle boundaries, and mis-orientation are some of its features.

Another visualization program is MTEX, a quantitative texture analysis toolbox for MATLAB [Hielscher2008]. It uses MATLAB computing and plotting capabilities to calculate pole figures, orientation distribution functions (ODF) and different representations of EBSD maps from Euler angles, Rodriguez, axis-angle, etc. Scripting to process many data sets is possible via the MATLAB interface. This toolbox is an active open-source project.

Another open source project is open-ebsd. It is dedicated to the analysis and visualization of three dimensional EBSD data; 3D EBSD consists of the acquisition of several slices of the same area. This is often performed with a dual beam microscope (combination of a focused ion beam column with a SEM). It implements correction algorithms for misindexed data points, misalignment between slices, clean-up procedures, and grain detection for 3D data sets. %instead of the and, you could end this sentence with an etc

ARPGE (Automatic Reconstruction of Parent Grains from EBSD data) is a program to automatically reconstruct parent grains from orientation relationships [Cayron2004]. For example, prior austenite grains of a bainitic steel using the Nishiyama-Wassermann orientation relationship. This reconstruction is performed in three steps:

  • identification of the grains in the EBSD mapping (referred to as daughter grains)
  • nucleation of parent grains sites according to the selected orientation relationship(s)
  • growth of the parent grains up to a specified tolerance angle.

The software is sold by the French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA).

CrossCourt is the software developed following the publication of the article on lattice strain measurement by Wilkinson and Dingley [Wilkinson2006]. Using a cross-correlation between the a priori recorded diffraction patterns, the software calculates the strain and lattice rotation tensor as well as the local strain to a precision of 1e-4 radians. CrossCourt 3.0 is commercially distributed by the BLG Productions company.