Calculating anisotropic physical properties from texture data using the MTEX open-source package

Abstract This paper presents the background for the calculation of physical properties of an aggregate from constituent crystal properties and the texture of the aggregate in a coherent manner. Emphasis is placed on the important tensor properties of 2nd and 4th rank with applications in rock deformation, structural geology, geodynamics and geophysics. We cover texture information that comes from pole figure diffraction and single orientation measurements (electron backscattered diffraction or EBSD, electron channelling pattern, Laue pattern, optical microscope universal-stage). In particular, we provide explicit formulae for the calculation of the averaged tensor from individual orientations or from an orientation distribution function (ODF). For the latter we consider numerical integration and an approach based on the expansion into spherical harmonics. This paper also serves as a reference paper for the mathematical tensor capabilities of the texture analysis software MTEX, which is a comprehensive, freely available MatLab toolbox that covers a wide range of problems in quantitative texture analysis, for example, ODF modelling, pole figure to ODF inversion, EBSD data analysis and grain detection. MTEX offers a programming interface which allows the processing of involved research problems as well as highly customizable visualization capabilities; MTEX is therefore ideal for presentations, publications and teaching demonstrations.