The acronym Dream.3D stands for Digital Representation Environment for Analyzing Microstructures in 3D. I bring it up because last week I attended a workshop dedicated to analyzing 3D data, which has become an integral part to advancing material science.
The 2nd 3D Material Science Conference also occurred two weeks ago, which my advisor gave a talk for me. The first 3DMS conference was held in 2012 (when I first arrived at CMU). The fact that there is an individual conference dedicated to this area of material science emphasizes the interest, growth, and advancement of the field.
Anyways, Dream.3D is a (free) software for reconstructing microstructures from EBSD scans or other techniques, analyzing crystallographic and morphological statistics, as well as surface meshing. Another powerful tool integrated with Dream.3D is the construction of synthetic microstructure, although this is something I hardly use.
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The software can give a lot of information. The challenge is always how to interpret the information though. I've been playing with my own 3D datasets of high purity nickel undergoing grain growth. In particular, I've previously been quantifying twins in a very a qualitative manner, describing them as edge twins, plates, (or at times even hamburgers!). I would like to implement a more quantitative metric though, which so far, the results of Dream.3D have provided a B/A and C/A ratio.
Obviously, as most twins exist as plate-like structures, the B/A aspect ratio (mis-labeled on the graph) will be rather uniform, but the C/A ratio will be more skewed, confirmed by the histogram populations.
Another part I've recently played with is trying to look at recrystallization interfaces. Although only a single grain is shown (which has been poorly reconstructed), it is obvious that there is a large degree of curvature and misorientation across an individual grain boundary.
Whether any of this holds significant information, I have yet to tell. As always, all tools are only as useful as the user can make them to be. The advantage of Dream.3D is processing of the volume of data, which in my previous experience, can be large, cumbersome, and slow to deal with at times.
Give it a try and see if it can bring anything new to your work: Dream.3D
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