Speaker
Description
The advent of modern functional energy materials, including nuclear materials, call for the development of local structural probes as their hierarchical arrangement of structures across length scales results in improved properties. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for improved methods for structural and microstructural characterization of such complex materials. An excellent emerging technique that addresses this problem is Diffraction Scattering Computed Tomography (DSCT) combining the merits of diffraction and fluorescence with computed tomography by scanning a pencil-beam along the sample to allow imaging the interior of materials. Specific 2D tomographic slice can be selected from a previous 3D full-field absorption contrast tomography of the sample. Thus, it enables to distinguish distribution of polymorphs with the extraction of the scattering patterns of amorphous and crystalline compounds with similar atomic densities and/or compositions and for extraction of their selective local patterns with an improved contrast sensitivity of the weak signals coming from minor phases, thereby increasing the sensitivity of structural probes. Concerning nuclear materials, this development at the MARS beamline is aiming to asses fission products retention and studying morphological changes in nuclear fuel (i.e. porosity development, porosity interconnectedness, swelling, fuel-cladding interaction…) after neutron irradiation up to a high burn-up. The project overcome several challenges into the development of an operational pipeline for DSCT that will be exemplified in this presentation.
