Patent ID: 6882739

Claim:
A method of determining average grain size and grain size distribution of a polycrystalline material, comprising: providing a sample comprising said polycrystalline material; irradiating a measurement point on the sample with monochromatic radiation energy generated from a radiation source, wherein the beam size and divergence of said radiation energy is adjusted so that an adequate number of crystal grains of said sample is irradiated by the monochromatic radiation energy; detecting radiation energy diffracted from the sample to capture a plurality of diffraction arcs within a single data capture frame; generating average grain size and grain size distribution data from the diffraction data of the detected diffracted radiation energy, according to an integral grain size analysis protocol comprising the steps of: (a) digitally registering raw diffraction data from the plurality of diffraction arcs captured; (b) filtering the registered diffraction data to remove background noise, exclude diffraction overlaps or truncations, and compensate for biased data obtained from regions with highly preferred orientations; and (c) correlating average grain size and grain size distribution data with the filtered diffraction data.