Materials Engineering- EH2

The Materials Engineering station on ID15A focuses on engineering materials methods and instrumentation. The main technique is energy dispersive diffraction (EDD). This experimental technique benefits from the unique properties of the new compact wiggler source (W76) that can provide intense X-ray beams up to several hundred keV. The major user activity is in modern materials engineering research where non-destructive diffraction techniques to investigate materials properties on multiple length and time scales are state-of-the-art.

Key points

• Energy range monochromatic 20 < E < 250 + KeV, white beam up to ca. 500 KeV
• Beam sizes from 30 µm to 8 mm

Techniques

• Energy dispersive diffraction for measuring large samples under thermomechanical load
• Angular dispersive diffraction using area detectors
• X-ray imaging/ fast tomography

Overview

Today this field has evolved much beyond routine 3D strain mapping and specifically makes use of the advantages evolving from high energy X rays in the range 100 - 500 keV. These X-rays can even penetrate through 70 mm of steel, allowing ‘real’ components to be investigated. New research topics will be driven by the development of novel 1D and 2D segmented or pixelated detectors, optimised for the high energies that are proposed here. This will push studies of dynamics in thermo-mechanical loading processes to the sub-second time scale and to ‘single-shot’ experiments with higher spatial resolution when combined with special collimating slits, offering new insight into materials processing.

For more information, see the scientific examples.