This week another segment of my presentation, recorded in a slightly different format this time (hopefully for the better, the previous one on SAXS on catalysts can be seen in this post). This time, I discuss an application of SAXS application in the field of metallurgy. To be honest, before I started at NIMS, I was not familiar with the use of SAXS in to study metals and alloys. However, thanks to Masato Ohnuma (my mentor at the time) and Julian Rosalie (an excellent microscopist in metallurgy whom I interviewed for this video), I have been quickly brought up to speed with the finer details of the effect of nanostructures in metals.
To my surprise, it turned out metals were not the static materials I was expecting. Indeed, small nanostructures can grow in the metals at moderate temperatures (<200˚C, see f.ex. this paper (also on arXiv)), and we also have evidence for such “ageing” behaviour in room-temperature alloys (see our most recent addition to arXiv). As you would expect, this structure can very much affect the mechanical properties of the material.
So in today’s video, I show a very short summary of the work for the study of ageing at moderate temperatures of MgZn alloys. Please enjoy and share!
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