Artículos SCI

Using area detectors for stress determination by diffraction methods in a single exposure greatly simplifies the measurement process and permits the design of portable systems without complex sample cradles or moving parts. An additional advantage is the ability to see the entire or a large fraction of the Debye ring and thus determine texture and grain size effects before analysis. The two methods most commonly used to obtain stress from a single Debye ring are the so-called cosαcos⁡αand full-ring fitting methods, which employ least-squares procedures to determine the stress from the distortion of a Debye ring by probing a set of scattering vector simultaneously. The widely applied sin2ψsin2⁡ψ method, in contrast, requires sample rotations to probe a different subset of scattering vector orientations. In this paper, we first present a description of the different methods under the same formalism and using a unified set of coordinates that are suited to area detectors normal to the incident beam, highlighting the similarities and differences between them. We further characterize these methods by means of in situ measurements in carbon steel tube samples, using a portable detector in reflection geometry. We show that, in the absence of plastic flow, the different methods yield basically the same results and are equivalent. An analysis of possible sources of errors and their impact in the final stress values is also presented.

A flexible and robust piezoelectric nanogenerator (NG) based on a polymer-ceramic nanocomposite structure has been successfully fabricated via a cost-effective and scalable template assisted hydrothermal synthesis method. Vertically aligned arrays of dense and uniform zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires (NWs) with high aspect ratio (diameter similar to 250 nm, length similar to 12 mu m) were grown within nanoporous polycarbonate (PC) templates. The energy conversion efficiency was found to be similar to 4.2%, which is comparable to previously reported values for ZnO NWs. The resulting NG is found to have excellent fatigue performance, being relatively immune to detrimental environmental factors and mechanical failure, as the constituent ZnO NWs remain embedded and protected inside the polymer matrix.