Speaker
Description
The small amount of carbon in steel (<1%), critical in determining its properties, strongly depends on steel production technology. Destructive methods have been generally used to quantify carbon. Still, non-destructive and bulk analysis methods are required from the perspective of quality control in steel production and the analysis of cultural heritages. We propose a novel method of non-destructively quantifying the bulk carbon content in steel by measuring the muon lifetime. The muon captured in decays into electrons or is absorbed in the nucleus. Most of the stopped muons in steel are captured by iron and decay with a short lifetime (206 ns), while the muons captured by the small amount of carbon present have a long lifetime (2000 ns). This makes it possible to detect iron and carbon sensitively by measuring the muon lifetime. The muon lifetime measurements have been conducted at the D1 area in J-PARC MLF using a large solid angle electron detection system for muSR. The Muon capture probabilities of C/Fe for some standard steel samples were evaluated, and the relationship between C/Fe and the elemental content of C was found to exhibit good linearity. Furthermore, muon irradiations for stacked samples consisting of three types of standard steel plates with different incident muon momentum were conducted, and we demonstrated non-destructive depth-selective carbon quantification with carbon contents of 0.20–1.03 wt% (K. Ninomiya et al., Sci. Rep., 14, 1797 (2024)).
| ninomiya-kazu@hiroshima-u.ac.jp | |
| Supervisors Email | ninomiya-kazu@hiroshima-u.ac.jp |
| Did you request an Invitation Letter for a Visitors Visa Application | No |
