A Workflow to Track Time-Resolved Dislocation Behavior in High Temperature Aluminum

<br/>Studying dislocation behavior furthers our understanding of their effects on the mechanical, thermal, and electronic properties of materials. Previous observation-based research on dislocation motion has primarily been conducted with TEM and thus typically concerns dislocations near or at the surface (&lt; 2 μm thick foils). While models for subsurface dislocation movement exist, many of these models have yet to be validated by experiments with comparable samples. Dark-Field X-Ray Microscopy (DFXM) is a new technique developed in the last decade to study subsurface dislocations. We use DFXM to track deep subsurface dislocations approximately 200 μm beneath the surface of single crystalline FCC aluminum at 96% of the melting temperature. In this work, we present a 5-step workflow to automatically track time-resolved dislocation movement in DFXM scans, including a Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) approach, convolution kernels, adaptive thresholding, structuring elements, and an image segmentation tool. This workflow allows us to identify and quantify the position of dislocations in DFXM images over time, paving the way to discovering more about dislocation dynamics at tri-junctions.