A Study on the Metallurgical Characteristics for Sand Iron Ingot Reproduced by the Traditional Iron-making Method on Ancient Period under the Neutron Imaging Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare analytical results of sand iron bars reproduced by the traditional iron-making method through a destructive analysis and a non-destructive analysis. For these studies, we produced two types of samples. One was sample(SI-A), a part of the sand iron bar for destructive analysis. The other was SI-B(9 cm 2) for non-destructive analysis. A metallurgical microscope and scanning electron microscope were used for the destructive analysis, and neutron imaging analysis with the Hokkaido University Neutron Source (HUNS) at Hokkaido University, Japan, was used for the non-destructive analysis. The results obtained by destructive analysis showed that there was ferrite and pearlite of fine crystallite size, and some of these showed Widmanstätten ferrite microstructure grown within the pearlite and coarse ferrite at the edge of the specimen. The results from the neutron imaging analysis showed that there was also ferrite and pearlite with 3 μm α-Fe of BCC structure. Based on these results, neutron imaging analysis is capable of identifying material characteristics without destroying the object and obtaining optimal research results when applying it to objects of cultural heritage.