Realtime X-ray phase and stress analysis

A German group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has recently reported a quick X-ray diffraction experiment during laser surface hardening of materials. They employed a single exposure setup with two fast silicon strip line detectors (Mythen 1K, Dectris Ltd.), allowing for stress analysis according to the sin²ψ profile, and the measurements were done at beamline P05, PETRA III, DESY, Hamburg in Germany. A 6 kW diode laser was used for hardening of the material at a heating/cooling rate of 1000 K/s. In the paper, they described how they can perform high-resolution strain analysis by separating elastic and thermal strains. For more information, see the paper, "Fast in situ phase and stress analysis during laser surface treatment: A synchrotron x-ray diffraction approach", V. Kostov et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum., 83, 115101 (2012).