A TEST OF THE REFINEMENT PROCEDURE FOR DETERMINING THE CRYSTALLITE ORIENTATION DISTRIBUTION: POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE

A test of the refinement procedure for improving the crystallite orientation distribution function is presented for a fiber texture sample of polyethylene terephthalate. This is a particularly difficult example because the triclinic unit cell offers no simplification due to symmetry, and the pole figures are sharply peaked. The analysis employed 17 observed pole figures and an additional 29 unobserved pole figures reconstructed from the crystallite orientation distribution function. After three cycles of refinement, in which the maximum value of the coefficient was increased from 6 to 16, the standard deviations, σq and σw, of the plane-normal and crystallite orientation distributions were reduced by about a factor of 3. The refined crystallite orientation distribution function indicates that the c-axis tends to align along the fiber axis for this polyethylene terephthalate sample.