Abstract
The grain boundary area has a great influence on the polycrystalline material properties and in nano crystallized metals. It could be considered as a glass metal phase in addition to crystallites in a composite structure. In this research, a general procedure for directly quantifying the crystalline and amorphous phases is introduced by using an x-ray diffractometry technique. Nickel with a nano crystalline structure was deposited onto pure copper samples with grain sizes of between 17 to 124 nm by an electroplating technique. A combination of measuring the area of the XRD pattern characteristic peaks and x-ray background scattering were used for the estimation of the crystalline and amorphous volume percentages. The results show that there is a non-linear relationship between the percentage of the crystalline phase calculated by the geometrical method and the area of the selected XRD peak. An experimental formula is suggested for the calculation of the crystalline phase volume percentage of the nano structure nickel samples based on the (200) x-ray peak area.
Highlights
For more than three decades, scientists have increasingly focused on designing new nano structured materials with novel behaviours and properties which sometimes are completely different from those of conventional coarse grain materials
The XRD patterns of all samples were matched with the face-centred cubic (FCC) reference peaks of nickel (Figure 2)
The average particle size of the coating layers were calculated by using the X-Ray diffraction characterization (200) peak located at 2θ ≈ 51.83 in the Scherrer equation, D = K /(β.cosθ), disregarding the effect of the microstrains: K is the shape factor, λ is the x-raywavelength, typically 1.54 Å, β is the line broadening at half the maximum intensity (FWHM) of the selected XRD reflection peak in radians, and θ is the Bragg angle; D is the mean size of the crystalline domains which may be smaller or equal to the real grain size
Summary
For more than three decades, scientists have increasingly focused on designing new nano structured materials with novel behaviours and properties which sometimes are completely different from those of conventional coarse grain materials. The volume percentage of amorphous phase in grain boundaries is not negligible in nano scale crystalline materials and it means that nano grain polycrystalline materials are a composite of crystal and amorphous phases. This could be one of the explanations for the special behaviours of ultra-fine grain materials This paper describes the relationship between the grain boundaries volume as an amorphous phase in a nano structured metal with its x-ray diffraction pattern without using internal standards
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