Matthew Schmitt¹, Sven Vogel¹, John Yeager¹, Ricardo Schwarz¹; ¹Los Alamos National Laboratory

The study of highly hydrogenated materials, such as hydrocarbons, geological materials, or hydrogen storage materials using diffraction techniques is often difficult. This is no exception for the explosives triaminotrinitrobenzene (TATB), and PBX 9502 (95% TATB, 5% binder). These materials are difficult to characterize using traditional laboratory techniques due to a problematic combination of low-Z composition, weak mechanical integrity, and a triclinic crystal structure. This study compares texture analysis of TATB samples using three different diffraction techniques: laboratory x-ray, synchrotron x-ray, and neutron diffraction. Laboratory x-ray diffraction was used to rapidly obtain partial pole figures for thinly sliced samples. Synchrotron x-ray at the Advance Light Source (ALS) was used to provide complete pole figures of spatially resolved locations within the samples. Finally, neutron diffraction experiments using the HIPPO diffractometer at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) provides an average bulk sample textures that can be analyzed from much thicker samples.