Flavio Cognigni

 

 

Short bio Flavio COGNIGNI, Industrial PhD student working on the project Connected multidimensional and multiscale Characterization Approaches for the Research Lab (CARL) in collaboration with the Department of Basic and Applied Science for Engineering (SBAI) at La Sapienza and Carl Zeiss SpA. Graduated with honor and an excellence award in Nanotechnology Engineering at La Sapienza, his activity is focused on developing innovative workflows, hardware and software solutions for correlative microscopy.

Abstract 

Title: Integrated workflow built on Advanced 3D Multiscale X-ray Microscopy (XRM) to investigate corrosion in iron-based artefacts

X-ray Microscopy (XRM) is a non-destructive characterization technique that provides quantitative information regarding the composition of the specimen and allows to perform multiscale and multimodal 2D/3D experiments with minimum or no sample preparation. These unique features make XRM a suitable tool to visualize the whole object and provide the spatial distribution of corrosion phases upgrading the understanding of the corrosion evolution in three dimensions. Since traditional techniques (SEM, EDX and micro-Raman) provide effective means to identify the chemistry and mineralogy of corrosion products, the best strategy to tackle complexity when analyzing corrosion in iron artefacts is to combine different analytical methods. Here, we propose an integrated workflow built on advanced 3D X-ray Microscopy to investigate corrosion in an iron nail from Motya (Italy) through destructive and non-destructive techniques, which permit the extraction of the maximum information with the minimum sampling. The results reveal the internal structure of the artefact and the structural discontinuities which lead the corrosion, highlighting the compositional differences between the tip and the head of the iron nail.