Abstract
Advanced models for engineering properties of polycrystalline materials require description of the spatial distribution of lattice phase and orientation. For this purpose the n-point statistical measures present a natural extension of the orientation distribution function, which is equivalent to the one-point measure of lattice orientation in single-phase microstructures. This paper describes the origin of the n-point measures in the context of statistical theory, and some aspects of their experimental determination. Fourier representation of the n-point measures in terms of tensorial basis functions is described. It is proposed that tensorial representations have some natural advantages over the ordinary representation using generalized spherical functions. An example of the application of occurrence of the n-point statistics of lattice orientation in a theory of creep in polycrystals is presented, and some limited comparisons with the uniform strain-rate and self-consistent theories are described.