Monitoring Elastic Strain and Damage by Neutron and Synchrotron Beams

Large-scale neutron and synchrotron X-ray facilities have been providing important information for physicists and chemists for many decades. Increasingly, materials engineers are finding that they can also provide them with important information non-destructively. Highly penetrating neutron and X-ray synchrotron beams provide the materials engineer with a means of obtaining information about the state of stress and damage deep within materials. In this paper the principles underlying the elastic strain measurement and damage characterisation techniques are introduced. The capabilities of the methods are illustrated through a number of practical applications including; mapping damage and stress transfer fibre by fibre in continuous fibre reinforced composites during loading, measurement of residual stresses in welding, the use of measurements to refine finite element models, and creep cavitation cracking in power plant steels.