In a polycrystalline material, which includes the majority of tonnage of commercial metals and even many polymers, there will be a distribution of crystal orientations within even a small cross section.

The classical way to reveal a microstructure in commercial metals is to make a cross section.

Many of my clients (or occasionally blog readers!) will send me a photo and ask me a question.

Last time, in Figure 13, we saw a series of four pieces of pyrite with increasingly numerous individual crystals within the same approximate volume of material.

Note the highly superior depth of field and surface detail visible in the SEM image compared to the light microscope.

Here's the second part of our series on how to view microscope images.

Over the years, it has become more apparent to me that a lot of people do not know how to look at photos from a microscope.

A common source of confusion in doing a failure analysis is figuring out how strong the material was supposed to be.

One service contract that came from a company with a promising used scope was really good ... for them.