3. Texture and anisotropy

Hot and cold processing results in highly textured products - sheets, tubes, bars, wires - with crystals that are not randomly oriented, but have one (or more) preferred orientation(s). This crystallographic texture induces an often marked anisotropy in the properties of use.

To characterize the texture of zirconium and hafnium products, it is generally sufficient to define the preferred orientations of the (0002) planes using pole figures. This is of course not enough to fully describe a texture, but experience shows that it is the orientation of the c-axis that is decisive for most properties. The Kearns factors f _L , f _T and f _N