  The ability to characterise the three-dimensional microstructure of
multiphase materials is essential for understanding the interaction between
phases and associated materials properties. Here, laboratory-based
diffraction-contrast tomography (DCT), a recently-established materials
characterization technique that can determine grain phases, morphologies,
positions and orientations in a voxel-based reconstruction method, was used to
map part of a dual-phase steel alloy sample. To assess the resulting
microstructures that were produced by the DCT technique, an EBSD map was
collected within the same sample volume. To identify the 2D slice of the 3D DCT
reconstruction that best corresponded to the EBSD map, a novel registration
technique based solely on grain-averaged orientations was developed -- this
registration technique requires very little a priori knowledge of dataset
alignment and can be extended to other techniques that only recover
grain-averaged orientation data such as far-field 3D X-ray diffraction
microscopy. Once the corresponding 2D slice was identified in the DCT dataset,
comparisons of phase balance, grain size, shape and texture were performed
between DCT and EBSD techniques. More complicated aspects of the
microstructural morphology such as grain boundary shape and grains less than a
critical size were poorly reproduced by the DCT reconstruction, primarily due
to the difference in resolutions of the technique compared with EBSD. However,
lab-based DCT is shown to accurately determine the centre-of-mass position,
orientation, and size of the large grains for each phase present, austenite and
martensitic ferrite. The results reveals a complex ferrite grain network of
similar crystal orientations that are absent from the EBSD dataset. Such detail
demonstrates that lab-based DCT, as a technique, shows great promise in the
field of multi-phase material characterization.
