In november new equipment for in-situ heating experiments for Quanta have arrived at the Institute. This new heating stage have important new functionality that provides opportunity for EBSD in-situ experiments. I have took the short, two days training that was provided by engineer who was in charge of installation of new system.
After the stage is installed and sample is properly attached to heating plate, actual heating of sample is relatively straight forward. The numerical value of desired temperature is specified by operator in dedicated software, and system automatically chooses needed voltage that is applied to heating element. Also the temperature is stabilised automatically by system and software and cooling facilities. At current time it is not possible to choose a slope by which the sample is heated and temperature raises almost instantaneously, therefore it is recommended to increase temperature in at most 100 degree steps with beam switched off (in order to maintain proper vacuum level). During the training samples of deformed aluminium alloy have been investigated, which was good introduction to in-situ recrystallization as I plan to perform such experiments on KoBo deformed titanium.