ABSTRACT

With the introduction of high flux neutron sources, multidetectors, automated sample positioning, optimisation of data acquisition, fast and cheap computers, fully computerised peak fitting and commercial surface fitting software, the situation has changed dramatically. The data for an adequately defined neutron diffraction peak might now be collected in a few minutes, or even less, and be processed near on-line, so that multipoint neutron area strain scanning is now practicable [6, 7].