Transmission Neutron Scattering for Bragg Edge Analysis on bronze and Cu-based materials

Historical metallurgy, and in particular bronze and other copper alloy metallurgy, represents a research topic of strong importance in the study of artistic and technological evolution of different civilizations. Archaeometallurgy studies are generally carried out by means of destructive analytics, such as metallography and scanning electron microscope analysis on cross sections, while neutron research based activity is usually limited to specific topics or seen as a mysterious still unknown method by the scholars acting in this field. Since heritage science aims at preserving cultural artefacts and neutron methods have the potential of being the best non-destructive option for investigating bronze artefacts non-destructively, we proposed a project aiming to develop and calibrate, in a quantitative way, non-invasive techniques based on neutron absorption and scattering for analysis of historical and archaeological copper alloy artefacts. CHNet_BRONZE will address and combine three powerful bulk analysis methods: ToF-ND, BENT and NRTI measurements on different powders of high-purity copper, lead and calibrated mixtures of them, for optimizing the elemental, phase and microstructural calibration of the parameters obtained by the three measuring techniques, to exploit such refinement for the interpretation of the data collected (at present and in the future) on historical samples. This proposal is relative to BENT.