A salient manifestation of anisotropy in the mechanical response of polycrystal-
line materials is the inhomogeneous partitioning of elastic strains over the
aggregate. For bulk samples, the distributions of these intergranular strains are
expected to have a strong functional dependence on grain orientations. It is then
useful to formulate a mean lattice strain distribution function (LSDF) over the
orientation space, which serves to characterize the micromechanical state of the
aggregate. Orientation-dependent intergranular stresses may be recovered from
the LSDF via a constitutive assumption, such as anisotropic linear elasticity.
While the LSDF may be determined directly from simulation data, its
experimental determination relies on solving an inverse problem that is similar
in character to the fundamental problem of texture analysis. In this paper, a
versatile and robust direct method for determining an LSDF from strain pole
figures is presented. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated using
synthetic strain pole figures from a model LSDF obtained from the simulated
uniaxial deformation of a 1000-crystal aggregate