X-ray diffractometer

• Subject Area: Production Technology
• Term: Funded in 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 494542718

The Institute for Applied Materials - Materials Science (IAM-WK) and the Institute for Production Technology (wbk) are concerned with the causes, measurement and evaluation of residual stresses and phase transformations in manufacturing and materials technology processes. X-ray diffraction has proven to be an irreplaceable tool for this purpose. In recent years, new research areas such as additive manufacturing and gear technology have greatly increased the demand for flexible and automated investigations that can be carried out on components. This particularly affects the research groups of Prof. Volker Schulze, namely the department "Manufacturing and Component Behaviour" at the IAM-WK and the research area "Manufacturing and Materials Technology" at the wbk. A research focus of both groups is the prediction of component states with numerical methods and machine learning procedures for various manufacturing processes, for which validation data must be available as quickly as possible. This requires the currently non-existent possibility of residual stress measurement in high throughput on samples close to the component. In addition, the IAM-WK's "Physical Metallurgy" (Prof. Martin Heilmaier) and "Structural and Stress Analysis" and "Defects in Materials" (Prof. Astrid Pundt) groups are investigating process-structure-property relationships in additive manufacturing, partly using X-ray techniques. The existing X-ray infrastructure at the IAM-WK can now only meet the growing demand for measurement tasks with increasing diversification to a limited extent. The previous restriction to small (a few cm³) and maximum 3 kg samples with exclusively stationary diffractometers and relatively inflexible measurement set-ups is a hurdle in the processing of technological questions at component and production level. The agility in the processing and clarification of scientific questions, for example with regard to the statistically reliable characterisation of near-surface residual stress distributions in lateral and depth directions on components and samples, is considerably limited by this. At the same time, modern diffractometers open up the possibility of flexible and automated characterisation of sometimes large components made of different materials. Combined with modern detector technology, extremely short measuring times can be realised under favourable measuring conditions. The present proposal shows how the acquisition of such a diffractometer will allow new scientific questions in the described areas, which were not or only insufficiently accessible with the resources available so far, to be answered.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Röntgendiffraktometer
• Instrumentation Group: 4011 Pulverdiffraktometer
• Applicant Institution: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
• Leader: Professor Dr.-Ing. Volker Schulze