steel sheet for transformer cores (to reduce magnetic hysteresis) and of aluminium cans (since deep drawing requires extreme and relatively uniform plasticity). Texture in ceramics usually arises because the crystallites in a slurry have shapes that depend on crystalline orientation, often needle- or plate-shaped. These particles align themselves as water leaves the slurry, or as clay is formed. Casting or other fluid-to-solid transitions (i.e., thin-film deposition) produce textured solids when there is enough time and activation energy for atoms to find places in existing crystals, rather than condensing as an amorphous solid or starting new crystals of random orientation. Some facets of a crystal (often the close-packed planes) grow more rapidly than others, and the crystallites for which one of these planes faces in the direction of growth will usually out-compete crystals in other orientations. In the extreme, only one crystal will survive after a certain length: this is exploited in the Czochralski process (unless a seed crystal is used) and in the casting of turbine blades and other creep-sensitive parts. Texture and materials properties Material properties such as strength, chemical reactivity, stress corrosion cracking resistance, weldability, deformation behavior, resistance to radiation damage, and magnetic susceptibility can be highly dependent on the material’s texture and related changes in microstructure. In many materials, properties are texture-specific, and development of unfavorable textures when the material is fabricated or in use can create weaknesses that can initiate or exacerbate failures. Parts can fail to perform due to unfavorable textures in their component materials. Failures can correlate with the crystalline textures formed during fabrication or use of that component. Consequently, consideration of textures that are present in and that could form in engineered components while in use can be a critical when making decisions about the selection of some materials and methods employed to manufacture parts with those materials. When parts fail during use or abuse, understanding the textures that occur within those parts can be crucial to meaningful interpretation of failure analysis data. Thin film textures As the result of substrate effects producing preferred crystallite orientations, pronounced textures tend to occur in thin films. Modern technological devices to a large extent rely on polycrystalline thin films with thicknesses in the nanometer and micrometer ranges. This holds, for instance, for all microelectronic and most optoelectronic systems or sensoric and superconducting layers. Most thin film textures may be categorized as one of two different types: