Qmax

The QMAX furnace was designed to achieve high temperatures under primary vacuum, air, or controlled atmosphere up to 1700 °C. It was developed in collaboration with beamline users within the context of an ANR project. The QMAX furnace can be mounted on the goniometer head on the diffractometer, to conduct in situ wide-angle or small-angle measurements under conventional out-of-plane, in-plane, or grazing incidence.

It consists of a ceramic plate, 20 mm in diameter, mounted on top of a heating metallic resistor.

Two domes (Be and PEEK), specifically made for this furnace, are available at the beamline. They diffract at different angles under an X-ray beam. The required temperature and/or gas environment, as well as the reciprocal space region that to be explored, define which one of these two domes will be used to prevent parasitic scattering/overlapping of sample-dome signals.

The QMAX furnace is equipped with two controlled gas lines, calibrated in terms of flow rate for oxygen and nitrogen. A Nanodac controller from Eurotherm is used to control the temperature read by thermocouples. different thermocouples may be installed to read the temperature of the heater and on different regions on the sample simultaneously.

Thermal stability of +-1 °C.

Heating rate up to 50 °C/s.
This furnace is well-suited for the study of a large number of scientific topics related to the behavior of metals at high temperature (solid-gas reactivity, thermal
expansion, phase transitions, phase separations, self-ordering processes, etc.).

QMAX Project (Quantitative analysis of the microstructured thin films. High-resolution X-ray diffraction and grazing incidence SAXS coupling) No. ANR-09-NANO-031-03 funded by the French National Agency (ANR) in the frame of its program in Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, and Nanosystems (P3N2009).

 QMAX furnace mounted on the KAPPA diffractometer with a sample fixed on a heating ceramic plate (left) and under a PEEK dome (right).

 (Chahine et al. Metals 2019, 9, 352)