Crystallographic texture

In <a href="/facts/Materials_science/N5HrXRYW">materials science</a> and related fields, crystallographic texture is the distribution of <a href="/facts/Crystallographic/9B5toeqG">crystallographic</a> orientations of a <a href="/facts/Polycrystalline/nXSgR0wp">polycrystalline</a> sample. A sample in which these orientations are fully random or is amorphous and thus no crystallographic planes, is said to have no texture. If the crystallographic orientations are not random, but have some preferred orientation, then the sample may have a weak, moderate or strong texture. The degree is dependent on the percentage of crystals having the preferred orientation.
Texture is seen in almost all engineered materials, and can have a great influence on materials properties. The texture forms in materials during thermo-mechanical processes, for example during production processes e.g. <a href="/facts/Rolling_(metalworking)/FQ6AQVld">rolling</a>. Consequently, the rolling process is often followed by a heat treatment to reduce the amount of unwanted texture. Controlling the production process in combination with the characterization of texture and the material's microstructure help to determine the materials properties, i.e. the processing-microstructure-texture-property relationship. Also, <a href="/facts/Geologic/WGvVRIYF">geologic</a> rocks show texture due to their thermo-mechanic history of formation processes.
One extreme case is a complete lack of texture: a solid with perfectly random crystallite orientation will have <a href="/facts/Isotropic/mc3QEY2x">isotropic</a> properties at length scales sufficiently larger than the size of the crystallites. The opposite extreme is a perfect single crystal, which likely has <a href="/facts/Anisotropic/YMqTQWVB">anisotropic</a> properties by geometric necessity.

Crystallographic texture open-in-new

Crystallographic texture