Reconstruction of three-dimensional microstructures of TiB whiskers in powder processed Ti–6Al–4V–1B alloys

Visualization of three-dimensional (3D) microstructure is useful for understanding microstructural geometry. In this contribution, 3D microstructures of TiB whiskers in two powder metallurgy processed Ti–6Al–4V–1B alloys are reconstructed and visualized using large-area high-resolution montage serial sections and digital image processing to study the effects of processing route on the morphology and anisotropy of the TiB phase. The microstructures consisted of eutectic TiB in Ti-64 and are free from coarse primary phase TiB. The eutectic TiB phase has whisker morphology in both the compacted and compacted plus extruded conditions. The orientations of TiB whiskers are uniformly random in the compacted condition and highly aligned anisotropic in the extruded condition. The spatial distributions of TiB are uniform in both cases without any clustering. The large volumes of reconstructed 3D microstructures are useful for incorporation into finite element-based computations.