Texture and Anisotropy of Crystalline Materials
Texture and Anisotropy of Crystalline Materials



Homepage of Kurt Helming


helming@texture.de


Deutsche Version

Revised at: 19.12.2000    (New links blue!)


Crash Course    Publications    MulTex 2.0    Downloads   

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Version 1.01:

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Documentation

I am a university lecturer in materials science at the TU Clausthal . Since nearly 20 years I am dealing with crystallographic textures. This are not the pictures of covered bodies, which are used as background in web-pages and having the same name. The crystallographic texture describes the geometric arrangement of crystallites (microstructure) in a polycrystalline material.
It is important because:
  • The most natural and artificial solids (rocks, ceramics, metal alloys or polymers) are polycrystalline. They contain many crystallites of different size, shape and different orientations.


  • A crystal is characterized by the periodic arrangement of its elements (atoms, ions) in space. This always generates a dependence of the crystal properties on the chosen direction, which is called anisotropy. The anisotropy of a polycrystalline material considerably depends on the preferred orientations of the enclosed crystallites. There are two boundary cases: If all crystallites have the same orientation, the anisotropy of the polycrystal exactly equals that of the single crystal. For the case of an isotropic texture in which all orientations occur with the same probability, the behavior of the polycrystalline material is isotropic even though every single element (crystallite) shows an anisotropic behavior.


  • Many technologies an natural processes modify the crystallographic texture. By the systematic generation of certain textures, the anisotropic properties of a material can be varied between the described boundary cases and thus be adapted to their given conditions of use.


In spite of their enormous significance crystallographic textures (as elements of the real world) are much less known than the graphic textures (of the virtual reality). The purpose of the homepage is to change this state.

The Crash Course on texture research will constantly be revised. Therefore I need your comments, questions and contributions. Above all I need your interest and a little of time.

The monograph:

Helming. K.: Texturapproximation durch Modellkomponenten. Habilitation, TU Clausthal 1995. Cuvillier Verlag Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-89588-617-3

is an introduction to texture research. The Publications give an impression of it's extensive character.

You can find a short description of the commercial program MulTex 2.0. It is based on the component method, which allows the determination and an vivid interpretation of textures. For beginners a DOS-version (useable also under Windows) as freeware Download is recommended.

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