Rigaku Miniflex Installed

Date: 2022-03-01

By: Mike Aubrey

After a long 6 months we’ve finally got our new bench top powder diffractometer installed! Our Rigaku Miniflex includes a Cu-K$\alpha$ source, 8-slot sample changer, and a HyPix-400 MF 2D detector. We’ve also been testing the air-free sample puck with a Be window. While none of our samples to date are extremely air or moisture sensitive, we have been able to obtain two hour scans without any noticeable signs of degradation.

Newly installed Rigaku Miniflex powder X-ray diffractometer!

Using disposable glass cover slides as the base plate and adding a thin layer of grease to restrain our loose powder samples we can get good signal to noise for our samples with a low background contribution. Using only a very small amount of sample at the center of of the circular sample plate we can still identify all of the major peaks relatively easily and the background can still be subtracted out with minimal issues. The scans shown below took about 30 minutes. We routinely collect initials scans of newly synthesized materials in 5 minutes or less.

1020304050largesmall2𝜃Intensity (normalized)
Powder X-ray diffraction pattern of V2O5 on the Miniflex. The trace labeled large shows the pattern when covering the full sample plate and the trace labeled small is using only an amount of sample to cover the tip of a small spatula.