Quantitative measurement of carbon content in Fe-C binary alloys by atom probe tomography

The carbon content in high-purity Fe-C binary alloys was measured by 3-D atom probe microscopy. The apparent carbon content increased with decreasing measurement temperature and greatly exceeded the nominal value. This anomaly is caused by the loss of some Fe ions during detection, resulting in an overestimation of the carbon content. A simple method was proposed to correct for this effect. The corrected carbon content agreed well with the nominal value to within 0.5 at.% in most cases. (C) 2012 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.