Joint use of double crystal diffractometry, beam broadening and conventional SANS for analysis of creep pore formation in liquid-phase sintered alumina

The formation of pores during creep initiates the failure of ceramic materials used for high-temperature applications. Thus, the determination of pore sizes and their number densities is of key importance in obtaining an understanding of the failure mechanisms. In former investigations it was shown that small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and beam broadening (BB) are powerful experimental techniques for the investigation of pore size distribution. In this paper it is noted that in addition to these methods complementary high resolution SANS experiments have to be performed in order to determine pore size distributions reliably in the size range from a few nanometers to several micrometers. The evolution of such pore size distributions have been observed during the creep of liquid-phase sintered alumina.