Comparing HREBSD with conventional EBSD

Residual strain affects most aspects of a material’s performance. Standard SEM based EBSD primarily provides maps of the spatial distribution of crystal orientation, i.e. crystallographic texture and nearest neighbour misorientation also known as meso-structure. These factors arise from the orientation relationship between the internal stress state and the crystal slip systems and contribute to the mechanical properties of polycrystalline materials.

Clearly, the details of a material’s stress state also need to be understood but attempts using conventional EBSD have only yielded qualitative and semi-quantitative results.

The introduction of cross-correlation based HREBSD means the internal stress state can now be quantitatively mapped and the interaction between the applied load and the features of the internal structure revealed.

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How CrossCourt4 works

CrossCourt4 uses high quality EBSD patterns from any EBSD system as its input data. Cross Correlation (XCF) methods are then used to measure relative changes in the patterns due to distortion in the crystal lattice caused by stress. Results generated by CrossCourt4 include the entire relative distortion matrix for each data point along with several measures of data quality. Traditional EBSD methods using the Hough Transform are sensitive to 0.5° compared to XCF at 0.006°.

CrossCourt4 can be configured to suit your analytical needs and is designed to:

• Work on multiprocessor workstations, automatically scaling in relation to the available CPU hardware
• Allow use on high powered Windows’ tablets thanks to its touchscreen facility.
• Keep the focus on the data and data visualisation with a clean and uncluttered user interface.
• Help the user smoothly drive the application, without lengthy menus or risk of confusion with item selection, enabled by the novel use of navigation widgets.

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HREBSD Applications using CrossCourt4

Globally, our customers are using CrossCourt4 for a diverse range of applications, for example:

• Assessing fuel and solar cell efficiencies.
• Assessing optoelectronic, ferroelectric and piezoelectric device behaviours .
• Benefitting failure analysis with new insights into crack nucleation and propagation and the effect of thermal and mechanical strains near inclusions.
• Looking at thin film growth, including thermal strains and misfit dislocation numbers.

We have a library of application notes highlighting examples of the use of CrossCourt HR-EBSD and Strain Analysis.

More than 60 CrossCourt systems are now installed world-wide; this includes major Materials Science research facilities, leading universities, and national government laboratories. Collectively, our customers are forming a powerful, knowledgeable and growing HR-EBSD community which we are pleased to guide and support.

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Quality of Results

CrossCourt4 produces two map types, the XCF Peak Height and the Mean Angular Error map, providing insights into the quality and confidence of the XCF result.

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World Class Support

BLG Vantage’s legacy goes back to the earliest days of EBSD and our HR-EBSD technology uses mature evidence-based analytical methods. Our BLG Vantage team page tells you more about us and some of the scientists associated with advancing the HREBSD technique. You are just a click away from the world’s leading experts in the field of HREBSD; known for our personable and responsive approach, we are here to help improve your material analysis and path to finding solutions to better characterise material properties and behaviours.

Our resources webpage  will help you further understand the HREBSD technique.

HREBSD – moving forward faster with CrossCourt Rapide

CrossCourt Rapide is our latest product, launched in 2025, and takes full advantage of GPU technology’s advanced multithreading capabilities for cross-correlation and remapping processing. CrossCourt Rapide bench tests during product development saw significant increases in speed – between 2- and 10-times speed improvement over the equivalent CPU calculation for cross-correlation and an astonishing 20-40 times increase for remapping!

CrossCourt Rapide – key features and functions at a glance

XCF Cross Correlation Function

Central to CrossCourt Rapide is the Cross Correlation Function (XCF) which defines the HR-EBSD technique. CrossCourt Rapide’s XCF software is 80 times more sensitive than conventional EBSD and, with a suitable GPU, up to 10 times faster than CPU calculations.

Remapping

CrossCourt Rapide’s remapping function allows a second pass at the XCF process and discriminates large lattice rotations from strain effects, typically observed in metals, and has between 20-40 times speed improvements over CPU equivalents.

High Resolution KAM

CrossCourt Rapide can obtain crystallographic misorientations with a sensitivity of 0.006 degrees; the HR Kernel Average Misorientation Map makes this improvement dramatically noticeable.

Stress and Strain Maps

CrossCourt Rapide measures strain and stress in your material quantitatively; elastic strain sensitivity is better than 2 parts in 10,000 and residual stress is at a spatial resolution of 100nm.

Dislocation Density and GND’s

With CrossCourt Rapide the HREBSD technique can detect the presence of dislocations; this is because the strain field associated with a dislocation produces a lattice rotation which is part of, and can be extracted from, the deformation tensor.  It is then possible to examine Geometrically Necessary Dislocations.

Line Scan and 1D Data Extraction – extracting line scans from 2D datasets and presenting results in the form of line charts – for all data display templates.

Integrated Help function – at the click of a button, with comprehensive information to guide software use and navigation.

Below, examples of the CrossCourt Rapide desktop showing the clean user interface and emphasis on data visualisation.

Complete list of CrossCourt 4.5 New Features

Full description of all CrossCourt features

Request technical specs and benchmarks for CrossCourt Rapide