Establishment and optimization of angle dispersive neutron diffraction bulk texture measurement environments

Abstract

Different from electron back-scattering diffraction and X-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction enables to directly measure the bulk texture because of the high penetrability and the large spot size of neutron beam and easily investigate the preferred orientation distributions of multiphase materials, coarse-grained materials and low symmetric materials including hexagonal metals, ceramics and rocks. In this paper, the texture measurement technical environments of two angle dispersive neutron diffractometers were established and optimized respectively, and their reliabilities were quantitatively examined through evaluating the bulk textures of a warm-pressed magnesium alloy and a multilayered multiphase steel sheet. It is found that the MUSASI-L neutron diffractometer with a single tube detector through selecting the proper collimation angle may achieve the similar texture evaluation reliability to the RESA-2 neutron diffractometer with one-dimensional position-sensitive detector, so that both of them are available to directly measure the bulk textures of various materials. In addition, the estimation of thermal neutron absorption shows that if a measurement error about 5-8% is acceptable, a cubic sample or a cylinder samples whose diameters is equal to its height may be employed to directly measure its bulk texture through completely bathing it in the well-collimated uniform neutron beam without doing the correction of neutron absorption anisotropy. © 2012 The Japan Institute of Metals.