X-ray Diffraction
Powder X-ray diffraction
Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) is a non-destructive analytical technique used to determine the crystal structure of a material. XRD is a versatile technique that can be used to analyze a wide variety of materials, including metals, ceramics, polymers and soils.
The PXRD facility in chemistry houses several complementary diffractometers:
- Benchtop diffractometer (Bruker D2 Phaser) suitable for qualitative and quantitative phase analysis, polymorphism investigations, determination of crystallinity, and structure investigation
- Bruker D8 Advance suitable for materials research XRD applications including high-resolution diffraction, pair distribution function (PDF) analysis, micro diffraction, and detailed studies of sample at non-ambient conditions
- Bruker D8 Discover used in materials research applications including X-ray Reflectometry, high-resolution diffraction, in-plane grazing incidence diffraction (IP-GID), small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), residual stress and texture investigations
Enquiries:
- Prof. Dave Billing | Dave.billing@wits.ac.za
- Dr Roy Forbes | Roy.forbes@wits.ac.za
Single-crystal X-ray Diffraction
This world-class facility probes the structure, symmetry and nature of bonds in molecular crystals. Accurate molecular geometries, stereochemistry and even absolute configurations of molecules are almost routinely determined from x-ray diffraction data.
Facilities include:
- Two Bruker single-crystal diffractometers: Venture Bio, D8 Venture Photon CMOS and a SMART APEX II. Microscopes: Olympus SZ61 with a Kofler Hot Stage, Olympus SZ-STS, Zeiss Stemi 508 and a Zeiss Discovery V20
- Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC): Mettler Toledo DSC 3
- Infrared Spectrometer: Bruker ALPHA II
Enquiries:
- Prof. Andreas Lemmerer | Andreas.Lemmerer@wits.ac.za
- Prof. Manuel Fernandes | Manuel.Fernandes@wits.ac.za