A Day In The Life of an XRD!

The Malvern PANalytical Empyrean in the MCF was featured prominently in a story recently posted online!

Many thanks to Neha Kondekar and Xenia Wirth as well as the MSE 2021 class for agreeing to participate!

If you would like to see the blog post, you can see it here!

The core facility for materials analysis at Georgia Tech is the IEN/IMat Materials Characterization Facility (MCF). The MCF is available to academic, industry and government users; it merges several labs on Georgia Tech’s campus and offers a variety of microscopy and characterization tools as well as skilled research staff to support research needs. Offering 24-hour a day shared-user access to the latest in imaging and analysis technology, and operated on a fee rate schedule, the MCF facility provides services for researchers including equipment training, remote sample prep and measurement, and imaging and analysis consultations.

MCF also happens to be where this top public research university and institute of technology houses their Malvern Panalytical Empyrean X-ray diffraction (XRD) instrument. The Empyrean XRD system generates X-rays, directs them toward a sample, and collects diffracted rays (the angle between the incident and the diffracted beam). Collected data are widely used for the identification of unknown crystalline materials (e.g. minerals, inorganic compounds), quantification of crystalline and amorphous materials, thin film thickness and structure, and many more applications. These applications are critical to studies in geology, environmental science, material science, engineering and biology.