Color Etching for Characterization the Grain Orientation in Spheroidal Graphite Cast Iron

Color etching is a widely used technique for visualizing different phases in metallic materials. Its advantage to the traditional etching techniques is that it gives additional information within one phase, namely, the color shade of a given phase can change in a certain range. This paper demonstrates that, due to the physics of the color etching, the shade of a phase also depends on the crystallographic orientation of the investigated grain. As a test material, spheroidal graphite cast iron was used, and individual grain orientation was identified by automated electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD). Results showed that there is a strong correlation between grain orientation and the shades obtained by color etching.