Industrial application of a quick, non-destructive anisotropy characterisation method

Abstract

Centerless X-ray diffractometers are specially designed for non-destructive residual stress measurement. The residual stress, and the crystalline anisotropy are induced by elastic deformation and are stored within the crystal structure. The similarity between residual stress and pole figure measurement led to the idea of developing the texture test method for centreless diffractometers. After the determination of identical lattice plane series distribution that can be measured with centreless and conventional diffractometers, advanced anisotropy measurements techniques were invented. In some cases, to characterize the sample from the aspect of crystalline anisotropy it is enough to make measurements in the specific directions (e.g. χ cuts in the rolling, cross and diagonal direction). With our centreless X-ray diffractometer, we managed to measure a χ cuts in the rolling direction under two minutes without sample cutting. The implementation of this non-destructive technique into the production line can be possible, consequently monitoring of the texture evolution even on industrial-sized aluminium coils. In this paper we compare the conventional X-ray diffraction measuring technique with our developed method on the example of a cold rolled aluminium sheets at different reductions.