Orientation reconstruction of transformation α titanium alloys via polarized light microscopy: Methodology and assessment

Emerging microstructural characterization methods have received increased attention owing to their promise of relatively inexpensive and rapid measurement of polycrystalline surface morphology and crystallographic orientations. Among these nascent methods, polarized light microscopy (PLM) is attractive for characterizing alloys comprised of hexagonal crystals, but is hindered by its inability to measure complete crystal orientations. In this study, we explore the potential to reconstruct quasi-deterministic orientations for titanium microstructures characterized via PLM by considering the Burgers orientation relationship between the room temperature α (HCP) phase fibers measured via PLM, and the β (BCC) phase orientations of the parent grains present above the transus temperature. We describe this method—which is capable of narrowing down the orientations to one of four possibilities—and demonstrate its abilities on idealized computational samples in which the parent β microstructure is fully, unambiguously known. We further utilize this method to inform the instantiation of samples for crystal plasticity simulations, and demonstrate the significant improvement in deformation field predictions when utilizing this reconstruction method compared to using results from traditional PLM.