Texture and Anisotropy of Polycrystals III

The great majority of solid-state materials – natural as well as man-made ones – have a polycrystalline structure. They consist of crystallites having various sizes, shapes and crystallographic orientations. Because of the anisotropy of crystal properties, the material as a whole may also be anisotropic if the orientation distribution of the crystallites is not random. Furthermore, because of the differently oriented anisotropies of neighbouring crystals, the material is also micro-inhomogeneous. Macroscopic anisotropy and micro-inhomogeneity are thus fundamental properties of all polycrystalline materials. Therefore, the study of preferred crystal orientations, or crystallographic texture, is of major interest in research and industrial applications. Analysis of the crystal texture is now a well-established tool for quality control and failure analysis in industry, as well as in academic research, because of the ready availability of commercial equipment and refined computer programs.