Additively manufactured (AM) alloys have heterogeneous microstructures with broad grain size distributions and highly anisotropic and/or non-convex grain shapes. AM components can have complex geometries and porosity which may affect the local microstructure. Currently there is no electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD)-based grain size measurement standard suitable for typical AM materials. An interlaboratory comparison study was conducted to find out what grain size metrics and summary statistics are currently used to describe average grain size. Participants were asked to measure and report the average grain size from the same EBSD map dataset. Detailed reports have been published in Reference [1]. Based on these results, we have tested and propose recommendations for a new standard for measuring average grain size in AM materials. The present work demonstrates the suitability and limitations of the proposal across several different Ni and Al AM components.
@article{arxiv.2605.28852,
title = {Towards standardisation of average grain size measurement of additively manufactured microstructures using EBSD},
author = {Vivian Tong and Hannah Zhang and Jacopo Del Gaudio and Ken Mingard and Ali Gholinia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28852},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
24 pages, 8 figures, presented at the European Microbeam Analysis Society (EMAS) meeting: 18th European Workshop on Modern Developments and Applications in Microbeam Analysis, 11-15 May 2025, TecnoCampus, Matar\'o (Barcelona), Spain