Determination of five-parameter grain boundary characteristics in nanocrystalline Ni-W by scanning precession electron diffraction tomography

Determining the full five-parameter grain boundary characteristics from experiments is essential for understanding grain boundaries impact on material properties, improving related models, and designing advanced alloys. However, achieving this is generally challenging, in particular at nanoscale, due to their 3D nature. In our study, we successfully determined the grain boundary characteristics of an annealed nickel-tungsten alloy (NiW) nanocrystalline needle-shaped specimen (tip) containing twins using Scanning Precession Electron Diffraction (SPED) Tomography. The presence of annealing twins in this face-centered cubic (fcc) material gives rise to common reflections in the SPED diffraction patterns, which challenges the reconstruction of orientation-specific virtual dark field (VDF) images required for tomographic reconstruction of the 3D grain shapes. To address this, an automated post-processing step identifies and deselects these shared reflections prior to the reconstruction of the VDF images. Combined with appropriate intensity normalization and projection alignment procedures, this approach enables high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of the individual grains contained in the needle-shaped sample volume. To probe the accuracy of the resulting boundary characteristics, the twin boundary surface normal directions were extracted from the 3D voxelated grain boundary map using a 3D Hough transform. For the sub-set of coherent Σ3 boundaries, the expected {111} grain boundary plane normals were obtained with an angular error of <3° for boundary sizes down to 400 nm². This work advances our ability to precisely characterize and understand the complex grain boundaries that govern material properties.