BEER - The Beamline for European Materials Engineering Research at the ESS

The Beamline for European Materials Engineering Research (BEER) will be built at the European Spallation Source (ESS). The diffractometer utilizes the high brilliance of the long-pulse neutron source and offers high instrument flexibility. It includes a novel chopper technique that extracts several short pulses out of the long pulse, leading to substantial intensity gain of up to an order of magnitude compared to pulse shaping methods for materials with high crystal symmetry. This intensity gain is achieved without compromising resolution. Materials of lower crystal symmetry or multi-phase materials will be investigated by additional pulse shaping methods. The different chopper set-ups and advanced beam extracting techniques offer an extremely broad intensity/resolution range. Furthermore, BEER offers an option of simultaneous SANS or imaging measurements without compromising diffraction investigations. This flexibility opens up new possibilities for in-situ experiments studying materials processing and performance under operation conditions. To fulfil this task, advanced sample environments, dedicated to thermo-mechanical processing, are foreseen

Non-destructive evaluation of strain-stress and texture in materials science by neutrons and hard X-rays

AbstractTogether with the microstructure residual stresses and crystallographic textures are important parameters in considering the application profile of engineering products. Both residual stress and crystallographic texture are related to identical grain arrangements. That means on one hand texture and strain influence each other and on the other hand both informations contribute to considering anisotropic materials properties, quality of welds, inhomogenous behaviour and so on. Non-destructive evaluations need experimental methods going deeply inside a material. Furthermore, it is necessary to handle complex and heavy samples. Neutrons and high-energy X-rays (about 100keV) have a high penetration power in the cm-range to fulfil these requirements. The instrumentation must be very flexible fitting the set-up for both investigations. The materials science diffractometer STRESS-SPEC at the Forschungsneutronenquelle Heinz Mayer-Leibnitz FRM II at Garching/Germany (neutron) and the HZG materials science beamline Harwi-II at Hasylab-Hamburg/Germany (synchrotron) are able for combined strain profile and texture gradient investigations non-destructively. The newly installed robot at STRESS-SPEC allows a very flexible sample manipulation for both types of experiments. First results are presented. Synchrotron radiations with higher brilliance are favoured for small gauge volume and fast measurements. That opens the field of in situ loading (tension-, compression-, cyclic loading) and in situ welding investigations