Neutron Optics Upgrades to the Residual Stress Diffractometer, KOWARI

In the last 5 years a number of significant enhancements have been implemented on the neutron beam strain scanner Kowari at the OPAL reactor in Sydney Australia. These changes have resulted in reduced beam time losses when conducting experiments due to sample and stage alignment, and optics and sample changes. There have been 3 projects, starting in 2011 with a new manual slit system design and collision recovery system, in 2013 with a series of radial collimators and finally with the delivery of a 6 axis robot capable of texture measurements and of running up to 20 samples automatically.