Correlation between ball milling conditions and planar effects on Cu-nanostructured powders

It is most often proposed that the process of ball milling introduces a variety of defects (vacancies, dislocations, grain boundaries, stacking faults,...) which raise the free energy of the system making it possible to produce metastable phases. But there are very few investigations that deal with the characterization and quantification of the defects produced in milled powders. XRD is really a valuable technique for a characterization in terms of size and morphology of crystallites and imperfections. In this paper, a new line profile analysis method is proposed in order to take into account the dependence of the crystallite size, of the residual strains as well as of the planar defects, o…