Effective structural unit analysis in hexagonal close‐packed alloys – reconstruction of parent β microstructures and crystal orientation post‐processing analysis

Materials with an allotropic phase transformation can form microstructures where grains have orientation relationships determined by the transformation history. These microstructures influence the final material properties. In zirconium alloys, there is a solid‐state body‐centred cubic (b.c.c.) to hexagonal close‐packed (h.c.p.) phase transformation, where the crystal orientations of the h.c.p. phase can be related to the parent b.c.c. structure via the Burgers orientation relationship (BOR). In the present work, a reconstruction code, developed for steels and which uses a Markov chain clustering algorithm to analyse electron backscatter diffraction maps, is adapted and applied to the h.c.p./b.c.c. BOR. This algorithm is released as open‐source code (via github, as ParentBOR). The algorithm enables new post‐processing of the original and reconstructed data sets to analyse the variants of the h.c.p. α phase that are present and understand shared crystal planes and shared lattice directions within each parent β grain; it is anticipated that this will assist in understanding the transformation‐related deformation properties of the final microstructure. Finally, the ParentBOR code is compared with recently released reconstruction codes implemented in MTEX to reveal differences and similarities in how the microstructure is described. A method is presented to reconstruct the parent body‐centred cubic microstructure from the child hexagonal close‐packed microstructure in zirconium alloys. This is used to provide post‐processing of the microstructure to understand structural units in the material.