A Small Angle X-ray Scattering Method to Investigate the Crack Tip in Metals

The work in this report, financed by the European Union through the Marie Curie Fellowship Association, was carried out at the FZ-Rossendorf. The subject of the research was to develop a method to investigate the damage, the high defect gradients at the tip of a ductile crack by means of Small Angle X-ray Scattering. The work explains the objectives and entails a brief introduction and background; it portrays and discusses the results which can be summarized as follows. Different damage parameters were investigated: the integral intensity, the total intensity on the detector, the anisotropy parameter and the fractal dimension. Of these, the anisotropy parameter is the most robust and most clearly depicts a damage region and the fractal dimension provides an idea of the structure of the scattering defect. The integral and total intensity provide comparable results only in some cases and are therefore not reliable.
From supportive investigations: Scanning and Transmission Electron Microscopy (S-TEM), Finite Element Analysis and X-Ray Diffraction, it is suggested that the scatterer created after deformation is related to large oriented dislocation networks.