| Abstract Scope |
David Fullwood’s many contributions to the study of materials microstructures are honored through a recapitulation of 3D studies. Early on this involved such challenges as the registration of serial sections to assemble plausible 3D microstructures, instantiation of simulations, evaluation of statistical quality, and comparison against classical models of grain growth. Synchrotron x-ray microscopy proved to be a useful complement to serial sectioning, particularly where microstructural evolution was important. Microstructures in 3D have larger neighborhoods than in 2D which proved useful, e.g., in early 3D reconstructions of parent microstructures prior to phase transformation in titanium and steels. The shapes and topologies of individual grains in 3D have provided data for many attempts to predict evolution but the evidence increasingly points to the importance of interface networks, which is a species of 2-point correlation, again an important focus of his contributions to microstructural science. |