Neutron and X-ray experiments at high temperature

Overview & Synopsis

Advanced technologies, like for instance aerospace or nuclear engineering require the most exhaustive information on the behaviour of materials used at very high temperature such as ceramics, refractory alloys or molten metals. Among high temperature techniques, X-rays and more recently neutron scattering have appeared as powerful tools to get information, mainly structural, on these materials in their working conditions. High temperature devices (above 2 000 K) developed for that purpose, based on various heating techniques (induction, imaging furnaces, lasers, gas-flame heaters and principally Joule heated devices) are reviewed. Some crucial points are particularly emphasized such as : — the determination of the real temperature (thermocouples and optical pyrometry) in the scattering zone hardly accessible partly due to the unavoidable thermal gradients, — the chemical reactivity of the sample with its surrounding, i.e. atmosphere and sample holder. Neutrons, mainly because of their low absorption by matter, allow the work on real bulky materials and give a greater freedom in the conception of high temperature scattering devices compared to X-rays. At the present time thermal neutron high flux reactors offering a wide range of neutron wavelengths are available, and a new generation of more and more efficient multidetectors has emerged in the last decade; the data acquisition and consequently the high temperature exposure time have been notably reduced, opening a way for precise and reliable experiments in the 3 000 K range. This very high temperature domain already studied by a few other techniques can also be investigated by neutron scattering.