The mechanical properties of polycrystalline materials are largely determined by the kinetics of the phase transformations during the production process. Progress in x-ray diffraction instrumentation at synchrotron sources has created an opportunity to study the transformation kinetics at the level of individual grains. Our measurements show that the activation energy for grain nucleation is at least two orders of magnitude smaller than that predicted by thermodynamic models. The observed growth curves of the newly formed grains confirm the parabolic growth model but also show three fundamentally different types of growth. Insight into the grain nucleation and growth mechanisms during phase transformations contributes to the development of materials with optimal mechanical properties.

Electric field induced ion drift processes in alkali-borosilicate glasses play a key role in the silicon-glass or metalglass compound formation in anodic bonding processes. By means of ex situ and in situ ion-beam analysis, which allows a quantitative depth profiling of different elements, the formation of anodic, alkali depleted glass layers and of oxygen enriched interface layers was investigated. Drift rates and depletion layer thicknesses were determined in dependence of the process temperature, bias, and drift time. The drift behavior of cations, including sodium, potassium, calcium, aluminum, and hydrogen, was examined. In addition, the drift of oxygen ions toward the compound interface was investigated. The absence of nonbridging oxygen in the investigated glass, verified by nuclear magnetic resonance investigations, gives rise to the conclusion that the drift behavior of oxygen ions depends mainly on the composition of the "leached" glass surface layer. The results confirm the anodic oxidation as the main mechanism responsible for the interface chemistry. The oxygen enrichment (oxidation) of the metal or silicon anode can be described by a reciprocal logarithmic equation.

The wide availability of X-ray area detectors provides an opportunity for using synchrotron radiation based X-ray diffraction for the determination of preferred crystallite orientation in polycrystalline materials. These measurements are very fast compared to other techniques. Texture is immediately recognized as intensity variations along Debye rings in diffraction images, yet in many cases this information is not used because the quantitative treatment of texture information has not yet been developed into a standard technique. In special cases it is possible to interpret the texture information contained in these intensity variations intuitively. However, diffraction studies focused on the effects of texture on materials properties often require the full orientation distribution function (ODF) which can be obtained from spherical tomography analysis. In cases of high crystal symmetry (cubic and hexagonal) an approximation to the full ODF can be reconstructed from single diffraction images, as is demonstrated for textures in rolled copper and titanium sheets. Combined with area detectors, the reconstruction methods make the measurements fast enough to study orientation changes during phase transformations, recrystallization and deformation in situ, and even in real time, at a wide range of temperature and pressure conditions. The present work focuses on practical aspects of texture measurement and data processing procedures to make the latter available for the growing community of synchrotron users. It reviews previous applications and highlights some opportunities for synchrotron texture analysis based on case studies on different materials.