ABSTRACT

In this Chapter, we introduce the common techniques to derive the distribution of crystallographic orientations present in a crystalline sample, i.e. its macrotexture, by means of X-ray and neutron diffraction. As mentioned in Section 3.4, X-ray diffraction was first employed in 1924 by Wever to investigate preferred orientations in metals by evaluating the inhomogeneous intensity distribution along the DebyeScherrer rings. With the introduction of the texture goniometer and the use of Geiger counters by Decker et al. (1948) and Norton (1948) pole figures could directly be recorded, and in particular the fundamental work by Schulz (1949a,b) initiated modern quantitative X-ray texture analysis. The principles of pole figure analysis by diffraction methods and the techniques and procedures to obtain quantitative texture data by means of X-ray diffraction are described in Sections 4.2 and 4.3. Since the 1960s neutron diffraction has also been employed regularly to determine crystallographic textures, and the corresponding methods are discussed in Section 4.4.