Advanced characterisation

Advanced characterisation is critical to the development and successful deployment of new metal production processes, new alloys and material applications of additive manufacturing to industry.

Advanced characterisation is critical to the development and successful deployment of new metal production processes, new alloys and material applications of additive manufacturing to industry.  State-of-the-art equipment and techniques can be applied to a range of characterisation problems.  These techniques include high resolution imaging in a Scanning Electron Microscope, Electron Backscatter Diffraction, Electron Probe Microanalysis, hyperspectral mapping and data analysis, X-ray Diffraction, X-ray Tomography, and Neutron Diffraction.

Advanced characterisation is critical to the development and successful deployment of new alloys and material applications to industry.  Key instrumentation is available to researchers to investigate problems in:

  • Characterisation of thermal sprayed coatings
  • Design and fabrication of nanostructures
  • Development of new smart alloys tailored for specific applications
  • Thin film(s) composition and depth analysis
  • Consulting work to determine a material’s properties and engineering improvements
  • Non-destructive crystalline phase identification
  • Quantitative phase analysis (including standardisation of methods)
  • In situ XRD simulating industrial processing conditions for determining reaction mechanism and kinetics of processes
  • Online XRD for monitoring process streams
  • Application of synchrotron and neutron radiation sources to structural and crystallisation studies.

State-of-the-art equipment including field emission electron microprobes and field emission bscanning electron microscopes offering a range of techniques which can be brought to bear on the sample to characterise grain size and orientation (Electron Backscatter Diffraction), map chemical variations down to trace element levels (Trace Microanalysis) and accurately determine composition variations across length scales of down to 50nm.

Advanced hyperspectral data collection methods and strategies have been developed specific for materials analysis together with data processing tools that utilise a hybrid clustering strategy to locate chemical elemental species without a priori knowledge to provide characterisation which the researcher utilises to bring new knowledge to solve additive manufacturing problems.  For example the examination of Arcam (link to Arcam page) fabricated parts can be characterised to assess the grain growth together with chemical variation to optimise these parts for specific customer requirements.  The images below shows an elemental map of an Arcam fabricated Ti6-4 test piece and the associated grain growth which is at right angles to the layer-by-layer fabrication of the powder delivery system.

Find out more

http://www.csiro.au/org/Microcharacterisation.html

http://www.platformtechnologies.org/microbeam-laboratory-csiro-15688/