XtalCAMP: A Software Package for the Analysis of Synchrotron X-ray Laue Microdiffraction

As a high throughput characterization technique, scanning synchrotron polychromatic X-ray Laue microdiffraction has shown its application potential in imaging the distributions of phase, crystal orientation, strain/stress, and microscopic defects in crystalline materials. As the advent of high-brilliance synchrotron X-ray sources and high-speed area detectors, comprehensive analysis and visualization tools are greatly demanded. In this article, we introduce a custom-developed software package, XtalCAMP, and take the additively manufactured Ni-based superalloy DZ125L as the example to demonstrate how the microscopic structure features are imaged. With the aid of this software package, the intensities of the Laue diffraction peaks are rapidly analyzed and thus the morphological features such as cracks as well as the microstructural defects distributions are imaged in real time as the Laue diffraction patterns are recorded. From the indexation results of all the Laue patterns in a scan, the crystal orientation and misorientation, and thus the high- and low-angle grain boundary distributions are visualized. By refining the Laue peak positions, the inhomogeneous local elastic strain/stress tensor is quantified. From the Laue peak profile, the content of the microscopic defects, including their type and density, are mapped.