Last month I took part in the ”9-th Polish-Japanese Joint Seminar on Micro and Nano Analysis” (Sieniawa, 10-13.09.2012). I had an opportunity to present a poster there entitled “Microstructure and microhardness of ball milled/hot pressed aluminium with Mg3N2 addition”, which described my first attempt to produce an AlN reinforcement in situ, in an aluminium matrix (via mechano-chemical solid state reaction).

Most of this month was spend on holidays, so there is much to write about but it does not concern science. Berore holidays i was interpreting data collected during previous month.

Having researched some more literature we came up with new compositions to be studied. New alloys will cast by means of induction melting as well as arc melting. Then we will transfer the bulk alloys into melt spun ribbons in order to compare the properties resulting, if any difference, from microstructure rfeinment.

I started last month with an attendance in The XXII Conference on Applied Crystallography which took place in Targanice. I had an opportunity to listen to many lectures covering a really vast spectrum of topics related to crystallography and materials science. I presented a poster entitled "On Frequencies of Occurrence of Geometrically Characteristic Grain Boundaries". In fact, during the preparation of the poster, many new ideas came out for the future and I started to work on extending the considered ideas to the cases of all holohedral symmetries with at least two-fold symmetry axis.

In September I was carrying measurements of Crofer22APU steel. EDS and WDS techniques were applied to investigate chemical composition of oxide layers forming on materials surface. Particular attention was paid to precipitates. It was found that with increasing oxidation time the density of crystallites containing higher amount of chromium was also increasing. Additionally, it increase in Mn amount on the samples surface, compared to theoretical value, was observed.