The strength of combining instruments

Combining structural with chemical microanalyses reveals a more comprehensive picture of the complex microstructures and takes product development to a higher level.

Mélanie Gauvin

More than ever, the demand is growing for affordable, high-performance materials operating reliably under extreme conditions. To meet these expectations, future generations of steels and metallic coatings are being carefully designed with increasingly complex chemistries and microstructures for optimised properties. Under harsh environments, bare steel components corrode, leading to weakening of their mechanical properties or even failure. The use of metallic coatings is one way to avoid corrosion. Zinc based coatings are considered to be an excellent protection solution, and they are used extensively.

Metallic coatings with an increasing number of alloying components have proven to increase corrosion protection abilities. These coatings are applied by hot-dip galvanising the steel substrate. With different compositions they contain multiple phase components, and their grain size spans from micro- to nanometre size. High sensitivity and high spatial resolution techniques are needed to tackle the characterisation of these complex materials. For this purpose, we combined our highend Field Emission Gun – Electron Probe Micro Analyser (FEG-EPMA), equipped with 4 Wavelength Dispersive Spectrometers (WDS) with our Field Emission Gun – Scanning Electron Microscope (FEG-SEM) and Electron Back-Scattering Diffraction (EBSD) detector. While, EPMA-WDS provides detailed elemental mappings, EBSD identifi es all crystalline phases and their orientation. The combination of EPMA and EBSD mappings provides a comprehensive picture of the microstructure, taking product development to a higher level.