Several national and international standards specify microstructure requirements for a particular material grade or alloy commonly known as Micro Constituents Counting.
LMATS is NATA accredited to perform manual volume fraction count in accordance with ASTM E562.

Austenitic, Duplex, Super-duplex stainless steels require adequate proportion of ferrite in the product to obtain acceptable corrosion resistance and strength and especially resistance to Stress Corrosion Cracking  (SCC). The laboratory based destructive method such as microstructural analysis on the test specimen or sample obtained from the batch of the product or components provides statistical quality assurance.
Manual volume fraction count or more commonly known as ferrite count in duplex stainless steel is the most common metallurgical evaluation for the fabrication industry.

Evaluation of intermetallics and precipitates (e.g. sigma, chi, etc) are commonly performed on duplex stainless steel samples.