What is the best way to detect eta carbide phase from sintered compacts or pellets with the composition of tungsten carbide and steel? Also, is it required to grind and polish pellet's surfaces before SEM or FESEM examination?
The easiest way is perhaps backscattered contrast images in SEM. Of course it depends on the size of your particles, and you should have some kind of calibration, e.g. using EBSD for the differentiation of the phases and then correlate the different gray scales for all phases. often this works already fine. Because of the limited reliability of C-detection by EDX you should certainly look for EBSD first. Alternativey, TEM is also OK. XRD can help as well if the phase fraction is big enough. For WC in steel you still can see 0.5vol% because of the strong atomic scattering factor of W. This might be a bit less for Fe3W3C but should be also in the same range (about vol1%).
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