X-Ray Diffraction

X-Ray powder diffraction is a non-destructive technique used to identify the mineralogy of crystalline materials. It is ideally suited for characterising rocks, soils, clays, cements and building materials.

Our powder diffractometer is a Bruker D8 Advance with DaVinci, and is equipped with a LynxEye Linear Position Sensitive Detector and a 90-position autosampler.

The instrument runs the DIFFRACplus software suite, which includes EVA for search/match and phase identification, and TOPAS for whole powder pattern decomposition and quantitative Rietveld analysis. We also run the PDF-4+ Scholar crystallographic database from the International Centre for Diffraction Data.

For non-ambient work, we also run an Anton Paar CHC plus+ environmental chamber. This has a temperature range of -120oC to +300oC in a nitrogen atmosphere, and -180oC to +400oC under vacuum. It can also be run in a controlled humidity configuration, with relative humidity controllable between 2% and 95% in the temperature range 10oC to 80oC.