On recovering intragranular strain fields from grain-averaged strains obtained by high-energy X-ray diffraction microscopy

We address a problem in the theory of elasticity motivated by the desire to reconstruct the point-wise strain field from partial information obtained using X-ray diffraction measurements. Referred to as either high-energy X-ray diffraction microscopy (HEDM) or three-dimensional X-ray diffraction microscopy (3DXRD), these methods provide diffraction images that, once processed, commonly yield the detailed grain structure of polycrystalline materials, as well as grain-averaged elastic strains. However, it is desirable to have the entire (point-wise) strain field. So we address the question of recovering the entire strain field from grain-averaged values in an elastic polycrystalline material. The key idea is that grain-averaged strains must be the result of a solution to the equations of elasticity and the overall imposed loads. In this light, the recovery problem becomes the following: find the boundary traction distribution that induces the measured grain-averaged strains under the equations of elasticity. We show that there are either zero or infinite solutions to this problem, and more specifically, that there exist an infinite number of kernel fields, or non-trivial solutions to the equations of elasticity that have zero overall boundary loads and zero grain-averaged strains. To address this non-uniqueness, we define a regularized best-approximate reconstruction, which may be efficiently computed with an iterative least-squares solver. We then show that, consistent with Saint-Venant’s principle, in experimentally relevant cylindrical specimens, the uncertainty due to non-uniqueness in the best-approximate strain field decays exponentially with distance from the ends of the interrogated volume. Thus, one can obtain useful information despite the non-uniqueness. We apply these results to a numerical example and experimental observations on a brittle aluminum oxynitride (AlON) sample.