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

Xu, P. G.   ; Akita, Koichi; Suzuki, Hiroshi  ; Metoki, Naoto   ; Moriai, Atsushi

Different from electron back-scattering diffraction and X-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction enables to directly measure the bulk texture because of high penetration and large spot size of neutron beam and also provides the possibility to investigate the preferred orientation distributions of multiphase materials, coarse-grained materials and low symmetry 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 warm-pressed magnesium alloy and rapid annealed multilayered multiphase steel composite. 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.