Comparison of X-ray and electron backscatter diffraction textures for back-annealed Al-Mg alloys

The potential of electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to determine integral macrotexture data is explored by comparing EBSD-derived textures with standard X-ray texture results. The comparison is performed for an Al-Mg alloy AA 5005 in the cold-rolled and various back-annealed states in order to analyse the impact of the microstructural state on the quality of EBSD-based macrotextures. The number of EBSD single orientation measurements necessary to represent a texture adequately is determined by way of exploring the convergence of the statistical parameter rho, which represents the relative mean square deviation between the EBSD and X-ray-based textures. The effect of EBSD filtering tools and the impact of sampling step size on the statistical significance of EBSD data are investigated. Several means to reduce the number of data points without compromising the accuracy of the texture results as an input for subsequent texture simulation are addressed.