Preparation of data from EBSD measurements for cellular automaton modeling of annealing phenomena in hexagonal materials

Annealing is used to soften and restore plasticity to metallic materials, that were hardened in cold working processes, and to modify the final product structure. Together with plastic forming, it is a crucial element of all thermomechanical processing procedures. While the mechanisms of plastic forming have been rather well understood, the understanding of the annealing processes (as recrystallization or grain growth) and the possibilities of controlling them and introducing expected modifications in technological processes is still considerably limited. The phenomenology of the process and its energetic causes are known and were examined long ago. However, not all relevant physical mechanisms controlling nucleation and growth of grains are clear. The modeling of the annealing processes requires the input data in the form of a possibly complete quantitative microstructure description of a material, both in the state of deformation and of different stages of recrystallization and grain growth. Such description to be used in the model is based mainly on the data gathered from crystallographic orientation sets, obtained in systematic local measurements of a sample, that underwent a specific deformation and annealing process. Advanced data processing, consisting in removing errors and wild spikes, calculating of misorientation axes and angles, grain size characteristics etc., are crucial in the process of creating the simulation.