Forward-model-based grain reconstruction to improve the tolerance of diffraction contrast tomography for increased sample deformation

To extend the applicability of synchrotron diffraction contrast tomography (DCT) towards more plastically deformed materials, we have developed a forward-model-based reconstruction method. This allows us to reconstruct grain shapes and local orientations in materials exhibiting levels of intragranular orientation spread that can no longer be handled with the conventional Friedel-pair-based indexing and tomographic reconstruction approach. This method consists of seed and regional indexing, in which an exhaustive searching and fitting of orientations is first performed to index the seed orientation, and then a regional indexing by testing a list of local orientations around the seed orientation is carried out to maximize the completeness. The capability of this novel method was benchmarked and compared with reconstructions based on the conventional Friedel-pair-matching and tomographic reconstruction method using samples made from fully recrystallized Al-Cu alloy, moderately deformed α-Ti alloy and 10% creep-ruptured Fe-Au alloy. The results show that this method has the potential to overcome the deformation constraint and can reconstruct reasonably well the intragranular orientations. It is also suitable for multi-phase reconstruction and both box-beam and line-beam acquisition geometries. The implementation has been made flexible to support the use of single or multiple GPU machines. The strengths and weaknesses of the current forward-model-based reconstruction are discussed in detail with respect to the conventional Friedel-pair-matching method. To fully exploit and complement the strengths of the two methods, the code to implement the current forward-model-based reconstruction has been fully integrated with the existing DCT code and is open source for beamline data processing.