Insights into the structural, microstructural and physical properties of multiphase powder mixtures

In recent years, research interests on structural and microstructural properties of materials have gained enormous impetus owing to their absolute necessity in many fields (e.g., chemistry, physics, synthetic and materials science). Herein, we present an insight into comprehensive ascertainment of the general structural, microstructural and physical properties of multiphase powder mixtures. We systematically explored the properties of the multiphase samples to disclose their structure and chemical composition features using a series of techniques, such as X-ray diffraction, and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The Rietveld approach based on structure and microstructure refinement analysis was adopted for precise determination of several microstructural parameters as well as phase contents of individual phases in the multiphase materials. The X-ray diffraction results confirms that the samples are multiphase and crystallize in the monoclinic baddeleyite structure with P 1 21/c 1 space group, orthorhombic mullite structure with P b a m space group, and cubic molybdenum structure with I m -3 m space group, respectively. The morphology features of the samples were observed by using scanning electron microscopy. The actual elemental distributions can be easily observed in energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry elemental mappings. To shed more light on the properties of the multiphase powder mixtures, their physical features (e.g., dislocation density, unit cell volume, X-ray density, porosity) were researched in detail. Moreover, the residual stresses of the multiphase samples were investigated by utilizing the sin2ψ approach.