Streamlining research using simultaneous SAXS and WAXS measurements
The Swedish Materials Science beamline has a world-leading instrument setup for simultaneous SAXS and WAXS measurements. This capability enables a fuller characterisation of materials composed of various phases and different sizes e.g. temporal information about phase and precipitate formations and their dynamic interactions.
The PETRA III Swedish Materials Science beamline is a high energy X-ray beamline, which was commissioned for research and innovation in materials science and engineering. This beamline is tailored to particularly suit the research interests of the Swedish community.
In-situ/-operando measurements are a key opportunity that the Swedish Materials Science beamline offers. In particular, this beamline’s combined SAXS and WAXS (Small- and Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering) instrument setup provides the possibility to capture quantitative information about materials that comprise of structures in a wide range of length scales.
This SAXS/WAXS setup has been refined, resulting in an instrument with outstanding capability. The outstanding SAXS/WAXS capability can provide researchers with new insights into heat treatments because phase information and precipitate information can be captured 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.
This report therefore aims to enable more Swedish researchers to make the most of the heat treatment research opportunities that the combined SAXS/WAXS instrument setup offers.
Using the heat treatment of martensitic steels that contain precipitates as an example, this report presents a description of how to streamline the research process - from preparing beamtime proposals at your home lab to analysing the beamtime data. Process descriptions are brought to life using information from the research case, with the case also exemplifying details of each stage of the research process.
This report starts with an introduction to the case as well as the PETRA III Swedish Materials Science beamline, and its combined SAXS/WAXS instrument setup. The streamlined research process, and its various stages, are presented and exemplified. In these descriptions, references are also provided so that researchers can go further and delve deeper into details.
The report can be found here.