Coloured metallography of Ti-6Al-4V alloys using phtalocyanine blue

This work presents a method to improve visualisation of metallographic structures in titanium containing alloys. After conventional selective chemical etching with Kroll's reagent, the surface of the sample specimen is manually dyed with a phtalocyanine based lacquer. The results are highly detailed and sharp coloured images when investigated with Optical Microscopy, providing much more information compared to the grey shaded, etching only approach.