OPTIMAL CALCULATION OF ODF WITH THE CANONICAL NORMAL DISTRIBUTION ON THE ROTATION GROUP

Abstract

Macroscopic physical properties of most polycrystalline materials are controlled by orientation distribution of their grains. The orientation distribution function (ODF) of a polycrystal is seldom if ever determined directly from an experiment. Usually experimental data are represented by a set of pole figures (PFs), these latter are some integral projections of the ODF. The main problem of quantitative texture analysis is to recover ODF from its corresponding PFs. With any set of PFs the solution of this problem is non-unique. That is why some assumptions about ODF structure are necessary. We consider ODF as superposition of the canonical normal distribution (CND) on the rotation group SO(3).