EBSD-measurements of textured apatite glass-ceramics

A silicate-phosphate-glass was placed into a furnace preheated to 1200 °C in order to crystallize rod-shaped fluoroapatite crystals. The partially crystalline melt is extruded to align the crystal rods, leading to oriented glass-ceramics with anisotropic mechanical properties. These glass-ceramics are cut parallel and perpendicular to the extrusion direction and treated using chemical etching, ion milling and polishing procedures in order to enable electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) measurements. The ability to obtain EBSD-patterns is strongly affected by the crystal orientation and the glass-ceramics are shown to be sensitive towards the electron beam and hence susceptible to sample modification during EBSD-analyses.