Materials Engineering has evolved as a crucial engineering discipline during the last 20 years. Microscopy has proved to be by far the most powerful technique for examining and understanding materials microstructures. Its methods are essential for developing new engineering materials of all types.
The ^IMicroscopy in Materials Science Series embraces books ranging widely across the materials spectrum, including metals, ceramics, polymers and semiconductors, and deals with the full range of available techniques. Individual monographs concentrate on a particular type of material or a particular problem in materials sicence and review the use of microscopy techniques to characterize and understand the relevant materials microstructures. The series will be of great interest to a wide variety of academic and industrial research scientists and engineers.
^IAtlas of Backscattering Kikuchi Diffraction Patterns will provide a comprehensive handbook on how to identify crystalline phases in metals, semiconductors, ceramics and minerals in the fields of materials science and engineering, metallurgy, physics, physical chemistry, crystallography and geology.
The authors describe the historical development of the backscattering Kikuchi diffraction technique, how it works and how it can be applied using the scanning electron microscope. It is the most straightforward method for obtaining selected area diffraction patterns and when used with the scanning electron microscope can be used on bulk samples. Patterns observed using this technique extend over a wide angular range and over a wide range of crystalline phases: the technique can thus be used to identify, classify and examine the materials microstructure. The text clearly explains how to prepare samples for examination, and how to interpret the patterns observed.
The Atlas section includes photographs obtained from metallurgical, mineralogical, ceramic and semiconductor samples, from six of the seven crystal systems with different Bravais lattics and point group symmetries. The examples chosen clearly ilustrate the features particular to a crystal system.
David Dingley has worked extensively on the development and pracical applications of the BKD technique since 1980. He provided the first commercial equipment for owrking on their interpretation, through the use of low light level television cameras. He has ben involved in several collaborative research projects in materials science and of late provided the first online computer assisted diffraction pattern analysis methods.
Karim Baba-Kishi is currently based at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He carried out his original research with Dr Dingley at Bristol, and worked on the early photographs taken to demonstrate the value of the BKD tehcnique. He has published several important papers in this area, and until recently was a lecturer in phsyics, and ran the electron microscopy and analysis facility at the University of Essex.
Valerie Randle is working on the commercial application of BKD and other analysis techniques for extending our knowledge of how microstructure determines the way in which different engineering materials behave. Dr Randle is a Royal Society Research Fellow, and is now continuing her research at the Department of Materials Engineering, University College of Swansea. The reader may be intersted to refer to ^IThe Measurement of Grain Boundary Geometry also published in this series, and to her earlier published work with the Institute of Materials, for further information on how to interpret BKD patterns. She has produced many of the diffraction patterns which form the atlas.