Ultrasonic scattering from polycrystals with transversely isotropic material texture

During laser-based metal additive manufacturing (AM), the melted powder is subjected to rapid cooling and the resulting microstructures often have material texture. In many cases, the texture is uniaxial (i.e., transversely isotropic) such that one symmetry axis defines the material response. Therefore, ultrasonic inspection methods that exploit the scattering from the microstructure are complicated by the resulting texture which affects the coherent propagation and scattering. In this presentation, a generalized approach is described in which the covariance of the elastic modulus tensor for a uniaxial ensemble of cubic crystals is expressed in terms of a fundamental set of constants. These constants are determined for an arbitrary texture from synthetic polycrystals created using DREAM.3D. With this information, calculations for wave velocity, attenuation, and diffuse scattering can be made efficiently for any wave type and propagation direction relative to the material symmetry axis. Results are compared with analytical expressions for simplified cases and then more generalized textures are examined. Finally, prospects for characterization of components created using metal AM are discussed within the context of input data from electron backscatter diffraction measurements. These results are expected to provide insight regarding the inversion of measurement data for texture characterization.