Papers by Author: D.J. Williams

Abstract: Titanium alloys are widely used in various industrial, domestic, and medical applications such as turbine blades, bicycle frames, knee implants, etc. The two-phase titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V (wt. percent) is considered to be a workhorse alloy for many applications in these diverse fields. Despite the large body of work on this alloy, the question of the transformation mechanism from the hcp a to the bcc b phase, occurring on heating to temperatures above the a/b transus at ~980°C, is still unresolved. Due to experimental difficulties, it has not yet been clearly determined whether the increase in b volume fraction occurs by fresh nucleation of b crystals within a phase grains or the growth of preexisting b grains. Since the Burgers orientation relationship holds only if the b grains are nucleated within the a grains, the outcome of this question greatly affects texture-modeling efforts for this system. The Burgers orientation relationship predicts that the {0001} crystal direction in a grain of the a phase becomes a {110} crystal direction in a grain of the b phase after the transformation. In this work we present experimental results from in-situ texture measurements performed on the HIPPO neutron diffractometer at LANSCE. Using the combination of time-offlight neutrons and full-pattern Rietveld analysis allowed us to determine the orientation distribution functions of both phases at room temperature, 800°C, 1020°C and again at room temperature. We found strong indications that the b phase indeed grows from grains preexisting at room temperature. Upon re-transformation from b to a we found that the Burgers relationship is followed.

Abstract: The impact of strong neutron absorption on data analysis and the comparison of two different absorption corrections for neutron diffraction data implemented in the GSAS Rietveld code are the foci of this work. We investigated the effect of absorption on the texture and the thermal motion parameter for rolled elemental foils. The orientation distribution functions (ODF) of rolled foils of dysprosium and erbium metals were determined from neutron time-of-flight data patterns collected on HIPPO at LANSCE. Both Dy and Er are strong absorbers for thermal neutrons with absorption cross-sections of 994 barns for Dy and 159 barns for Er at l = 1.8 Å. Various stacks of foils of each material, along with combinations of absorbing and less-absorbing foils, were measured. The patterns were analyzed using the GSAS options for Debye-Scherrer and linear absorption models, as well as without an absorption correction. Discrepancies between refined and expected “true” values of crystallographic parameters if absorption is not taken into consideration are discussed.