ABSTRACT
The scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a powerful instrument for acquiring microtexture data and characterizing the local crystallography of materials (Wilkinson and Hirsch, 1997). EBSD is the technique that has become almost universally used to obtain such data, so most of this chapter is devoted to a description of the principles and practice of EBSD. Although EBSD has now become a mainstream and powerful experimental tool for a whole range of microstructure characterization, the focus throughout this book is on its application to microtexture analysis. Two other SEM-based techniques, micro-Kossel and electron channeling diffraction or SAC, were forerunners of EBSD and, although they are comparatively less used nowadays, they are included here for completeness.
