Streamlining in-situ SAXS/WAXS heat treatment experiments at the PETRA III Swedish Materials Science beamline
Release date: August 2024
Authors: Tao Zhou, Gabriel Spartacus, Denise McCluskey, Peter Hedström and Fredrik Eriksson
Get step-by-step guidelines on how to streamline beamline experiments of in situ heat treatment experiments of materials that contain precipitates in this (pdf 1.9 MB) CeXS Technical Report.
The PETRA III Swedish Materials Science beamline has an outstanding combined SAXS and WAXS instrument setup. This setup can capture phase information and precipitate information simultaneously - at temporal resolutions down to 1 second. This enables the kinetics of precipitation and phase transformations to be assessed in detail, i.e. microstructural evolution can be quantitatively tracked.
The challenge for researchers however is getting both an overview, and knowing the details of, the research process - from preparing beamtime proposals at your home lab to analysing the beamtime data.
Addressing this challenge is the aim of this CeXS Technical Report.
This report describes a four stage research process for getting to results. The process stages are preparing proposals for beamtimes, beamtime preparations, beamline measurements, and comprehensive data analysis. Process descriptions and details are brought to life using information from a research case.
The research case also exemplifies details of each stage of the research process. For example, the comprehensive data analysis stage of the process shows how to determine results such as the volume fraction of precipitates, cell parameters and lattice defects as well as the evolution of the unit cell parameter and quantification of dislocation density. How to calculate the mean radius of the precipitates and precipitate volume fraction from the beamline data is also explained.
CeXS wishes researchers every success in using this report to make the most of the PETRA III Swedish Materials Science beamline’s outstanding combined SAXS and WAXS instrument setup.