As the term is chasing, I had to reliably get to work and write. So that month I focused on writing, leaving for a moment my research. I managed to write a piece of theoretical introduction for cell construction and operation.

During November:
- I have been writing an introduction to my work
- I have prepared powders from ternary melt spun ribbons and obtained my first bulk samples by hot pressing
- I did some TEM studies on annealed samples of quaternary Al-Mn-Fe-Mo melts spun ribbons

I was testing the method for finding
peaks in grain boundary distributions.
It seem that it is quite efficient, but
some control parameters and threshold
must be adjusted. I have been playing with
differen values of those parameters
for various data sets.

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.

Today we have international Santa Claus day! I wish you all as many presents as you like :)
During past month I conctucted new study on hardening mechanism in MgZnCa alloys - longer times were used to observe precipitation evolution. New thin foils for TEM were prepared.