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The D2 Phaser 6-position autosampler uses a completely different sample holder that their other systems. We’ve just completed our first production run of these blanks so they’ll be ready for custom orders. Contact KSA for more information.

You can never have enough sample holders no matter what machine you’re running. We’ve certainly found this to be true at Texray so we always try to keep a large number of them on-hand. KS Analytical Systems has always made one-off and custom sample holders for the Bruker instruments, but we’re now offering the standard PMMA powder holders as well at significant cost savings over the OEM version. The standard holder (25mm x 1mm deep well) is priced at $55 with bulk discounts starting at 20 holders.

Custom well depths, diameters, grooved floors, side-loading and zero-background versions are available.

Our PMMA holders are compatible with Bruker D8 Focus – D8 Advance (single, FlipStick autosampler, 90-position autosampler), D4 Endeavor and D2 Phaser (single only) systems. D500 and D5000 instruments can also use these holders.

We’ve brought the complete manufacturing process in-house to give us the freedom to make the custom designs our customer have always asked for. This includes custom laser etching. Company logos are a common request, but we’ve also started serializing sample holders on request. At Texray, we even etch them with barcodes for tracking samples through the data collection process.

The pictures below show a custom funnel tool for filling side-loading sample holders. The tool is machined from billet aluminum with an acrylic window on the funnel to make it easier to gauge fill level. The funnel itself is polished and the viewing plate which allows the users to see when the sample well is full is made of sapphire crystal for maximum scratch resistance.

The dreaded “amorphous” hump created by x-rays scattering off plastic sample holders has plagued XRD users for decades. It’s a serious enough problem that we make a good volume of these holders from Aluminum which works very well for loose powders. The plastic scatters xrays at around 13 degrees 2Theta (Cu anode tube) which make a real mess of most geological patterns and isn’t fun to model out for Rietveld refinement. Zero background holders like our ZBH-32 work wonderfully in standard sample stages designed for a single sample at a time, but the large plate isn’t compatible with the autosampler.

 

I recently had a request for a hybrid holder which would allow for analysis of very small volumes of materials while retaining compatibility with the autosampler. This is almost identical to our standard powder holders, but with a well designed specifically for our small ZBH plate.

Key features include:

  • 6061-T6 Al material (anodized or as-machined)
  • Si(510) plate
  • Raised sample well minimizes the area of the sample holder in the plane of diffraction. (Original Siemens design)
  • Beveled well walls minimize the area of Al in the plane of diffraction
  • Other small modifications are made to improve reliability of these holders in the autosampler

The majority of the samples we receive come in volumes high enough to completely fill the well in any of our standard sample holders. Some are too large or oddly shaped which calls for a special holding solution like those listed here, but many are simply very small quantities of powder. Placing these in a standard holder would leave them well outside the plane of diffraction and provide terrible data, not to mention substantial scatter
or diffracted background from whatever the powder is placed on. The answer is a zero background sample holder (ZBH). Most our users at KS Analytical Systems run the original Siemens/Bruker plates, but others are using Si(100) and even glass substrates. We’re very happy to say that
we’re able to offer a direct replacement for these with our new ZBH-32 holders. These fit most Siemens XRD systems and can be customized for use in most any other system. Contact us for more information on this. The scan below shows the data collected from a single mg of Silicon 640B standard powder spread across a ZBH.

Off Planar Quartz ZBH w-1mg 640B

Full scan of 1mg Silicon 640B standard spread across a ZBH

ZBH-32

ZBH-32 sample holders mounted for Siemens and Bruker single sample stages.

 

Some users report acceptable results using simple glass plates. While there are serious caveats here, it may be a reasonable solution for some users. The issue with amorphous glass is not diffracted peaks in the background, but rather, scatter off the surface. X-ray scattering off a surface is inversely proportional to the average atomic number of that material. That is to say, the lighter the matrix, the more efficiently it will scatter X-rays. This is why we use a pure Graphite sample to characterize the emission spectra of our XRF instrumentation. The glass sample shows the expected scatter “hump” starting at a very low angle and it doesn’t flatten until nearly 100°2Θ. While some of this can be modeled and subtracted with good profile fitting software like Jade 2010, it can be challenging to match the data quality of a good ZBH. We’re working on a series of videos to guide new users through some of these features, but on-site training classes are also available.

 

Glass plate

Amorphous glass empty

Glass-Qtz-Si510 overlay

Glass, ZBH-32 and off-planar quartz scans overlayed for comparison

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several of our customers in the geological industry use standard Si(100) wafers. These can be a great solution, but again have serious drawbacks for some applications. The Si(100) material creates diffracted peaks which are very sharp and therefore easier to model out sometimes, but also very high as the material is monocrystalline. The scan below shows what happens when one tries to run a normal scan across a bare plate. The largest peaks are actually only one or two which have over loaded the detector and caused it to drop out. All of these scans were collected with our SDD-150 which can handle up to 1×10^6 cps, but for the sake of good comparison, we left it tuned as it would be for a standard pattern. The monocrystalline nature of this material causes big problems, but it also allows for a creative solution. See the second scan for the results of the same measurement with the plate angled 1 degree off of theoretical. With this geometry, it’s unlikely this would affect the data quality dramatically, but the offending peaks are drastically diminished.

 

Si-100 wafer

Si-100 empty

Si-100 locked vs unlocked

Si-100 standard vs skewed scan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off-planar Quartz holders have been the industry standard for decades. Historically, these have been made from solid, monocrystalline quartz material cut at a specific angle (6° off the C axis if I’m not mistaken). While these work well, they can be inconsistent. Even some of the OEM holders we’ve tested have shown some peaks which we can’t explain. Talking to some very experienced crystallographers, we find that they’ve had similar experiences.

 

 

Off Planar Quartz ZBH

Off-planar Quartz empty

ZBH-32 empty

ZBH-32 empty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve been looking for a better answer for several years, but there are few off-the-shelf materials which work as well as off-planar quartz. The ideal answer was to cut solid Si(100) oriented billets such that the face presented to the diffractometer had no d-spacings which would diffract in the normal range of these machines. This is not unlike the off-planar Quartz method, but the starting material is much more consistent and durable. Si(510) offers very low background as well as the consistency of a manufactured product. The new ZBH-32 sample holders from KSA come in two versions, ZBH-25 and ZBH-32 with the latter being ideally suited for rotating stages and low angle work.

 

 

 

 

Posted by: In: Uncategorized 25 Aug 2014 0 comments Tags: , , , , ,

The most common practice in powder XRD is to simply fill the recessed well of a sample holder with finely ground powder and start collecting data. That works for a great many users, but everyone is eventually faced with a more complicated situation at some point. At Texray, odd samples and special requirements are the norm. The photos below represent some of the common and not-so-common needs we’ve come across. Many of these are one-off designs fabricated by KS Analytical Systems.

20140825_143140The top row shows the three most common holders we see with various well depths. These are almost exclusively used for loose powders. The goal is to get the surface of the sample into the plane of diffraction with as little of the holder in the beam as possible. The plastic material has a very high scattering coefficient which creates a hump in the data around 13 degrees 2Theta. These are all designed for the 40-position sample changers from Siemens (now Bruker).

The second row gets more interesting with a special holder for high volume instruments. This was designed for magnetic handling and worked great as long as you don’t mind the low angle scatter problem of the plastic and aren’t working with ferrous powders.

The middle is one we use for collecting data from membrane filters. These are notoriously hard to hold down with any precision so they get mounted from the rear and held against a “lip” to keep them both flat, and in the plane of diffraction. They work wonderfully.

Next we have a simple side load sample holder. I’m a big fan of these and use them anytime I’m running loose powders on a single sample stage. It allows the user to load with a very smooth top surface that’s perfectly flat without creating any preferred orientation. Preferred orientation is frequently caused by pressure being applied to the basic top-load holders in an effort to get a flat surface. It is to be avoided whenever possible. Notice that the holders are all Aluminum at this point. Most custom holders are Al or a combination of Al and stainless steel depending upon the special properties desired.

The last row are good examples of odd-shaped sample holders. When you’ve got a rock with one flat surface or a little chip of some material, you still need to keep it in the plane of diffraction. The user simply places a ball of clay in the middle of the holder, the sample goes on top of that and then a glass plate is used to crush the clay (with the sample on top) down such that everything is in plane with the elevates posts. These posts interface with the machine to define the plane of diffraction right across their surface, thus the sample is right where it needs to be without any complicated engineering or microscopic adjustments.

 

Custom holders for a D500 user. Side load as well as top-load in Al.

Custom holders for a D500 user. Side load as well as top-load in Al.

Side load precision without the possibility of powder falling out at low angles.

Side load precision without the possibility of powder falling out at low angles.

Vacuum holding is common when working with semiconductors or other materials with very consistent thicknesses.

Vacuum holding is common when working with semiconductors or other materials with very consistent thicknesses.

We needed to keep our standards in our desiccator cabinet as well as store membrane filters long-term. Custom laser-cut shelves make this easy.

We needed to keep our standards in our desiccator cabinet as well as store membrane filters long-term. Custom laser-cut shelves make this easy.

A typical run of custom sample holders for a high volume XRD operation. This user actually has a custom loading tool that allows for multiple holders to be filled simultaneously.

A typical run of custom sample holders for a high volume XRD operation. This user actually has a custom loading tool that allows for multiple holders to be filled simultaneously.

This is a completely custom stage designed to hold a large thrust bearing race such that the bottom of the groove is in the plane of diffraction for retained austenite and residual stress measurements.  The bearing is held in place by magnets.

This is a completely custom stage designed to hold a large thrust bearing race such that the bottom of the groove is in the plane of diffraction for retained austenite and residual stress measurements. The bearing is held in place by magnets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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XRD patterns are complicated by a variety of undesirable effects. Some of which are easy to deal with, others are unavoidable. One of the issues we see often is scattering and diffraction effects that are actually being caused by the sample holder itself. These effects can usually be modeled out, but simply knowing which artifacts are being generated from scatter off the sample holder vs amorphous content or phases present in the sample itself can make the difference between an easy analysis and a grinding, iterative march toward a final result. One of the most common effect we see is scatter from plastic sample holders. Most of the sample holders we produce are either Aluminum or PMMA plastic, but either way, one of the easiest ways to avoid undesirable scatter is to simply enlarge the sample well. We’ve been doing this for decades on the standard, non-rotating sample holders by cutting a large, rectangular well rather than the standard, 25mm circular well.

This week we did a little experiment to see just how much larger our sample well needed to be to eliminate the common PMMA hump at ~13 degrees 2Theta (Cu energy). It turns out that an increase of only 5mm in diameter made a huge difference in the total scatter even with very “wide-open” optics. See the scan images below for a real-world picture of the difference we saw. This may not seem like a significant problem until you’re looking for phases with D-spacings down in that region near the hump. Analysis of clay minerals can become particularly complicated. This is a great example of why we love talking to clients and XRD users around the world.

We often receive requests for small powder wells to be ground into our zero-background sample holder plates. I usually try to talk the requestor out of this as it has limited usefulness for most applications, but there are some reasons one might benefit from this type of holder. It’s for these special cases that we’ve always offered custom ground wells in our ZBH plates and we continually improve our process to give our clients exactly what they want and need to get their work done.

There are three reasons I try to avoid this.

  1. It adds cost. The very small grinding tools required for this cut very slowly. This is partially to avoid building up heat in the plate which will shatter if it goes too far. In the foolishness of my youth I once tried to score large wafers with a CO2 laser. After two passes it would explode leaving about 50% waste material, but it got the job done. Heat is your enemy when it comes to very hard materials like this. We also don’t use pre-ground plates. Each one is machined from a flat plate after it’s been mounted in the sample holder to ensure perfect alignment with the plane of diffraction while also giving us the freedom to cut any shape/depth we could want. I.e. if one wanted a square or oval shaped pocket, we could machine that. All this flexibility adds up to additional work/time which adds to the cost of each holder.
  2. It’s often unnecessary. If you have enough material to fill most wells, it probably won’t be transparent to x-rays anyway. I find that many users of sample holders with wells could get by without them by simply using a smaller well in a standard sample holder. The additional scatter from PMMA plastic may or may not be a problem, but if the user can live with it, it’s a huge cost saver.
  3. As soon as we break the surface, we’re no longer dealing with a monocrystalline material. I’ve never seen any practical evidence that this causes a problem, but it’s always concerned me that grinding these plates essentially creates a polycrystalline material at the surface of the well. I would love to hear from anyone who’s ever seen a weak Si pattern superimposed on their data.

One alternative I often recommend is recessing the entire plate by some number of microns to accommodate different particle sizes if that’s a concern. I believe that many XRD users are asking for sample wells in their ZBH simply to avoid the displacement error inherent in mounting their powder on top of a plate which has already been fixed at the plane of diffraction. Recessing the plate allows us to retain the polished surface of the ZBH and allows us to mount it with at least the same degree of precision that a well would provide. Precision mounting adds about as the same cost as grinding, but it definitely has benefits. To my knowledge, KSA is the only company offering this type of mounting.

So that was an awful lot of reasons to avoid this, but there is one very big benefit of using a ZBH with a ground well. This allows you to run very small volumes of sample material while maintaining a very consistent irradiated area. Imagine the same volume of powder spread across a flat plate. Each time this is done, a slightly (if not significantly) different surface area of the plate is likely to be presented. The end result of this will be variations in intensity and perhaps preferred-orientation. Particle statistics change with varying numbers of crystallites in the plane of diffraction as well. This is all complicated by the changes in the irradiated area throughout a normal scan with divergent-beam optics.

The well pictured here is 12mm in diameter and 0.2mm in depth and a good example of the kind of custom work that is most common for us.

It’s relatively common for us to receive very small volumes of material for analysis. Often this is the total amount available so getting the right answers is extremely important. When these come in as powders, the answer is always to run them on a zero background plate, but sometimes that’s not the case. Luckily, there are other options for analysis of very small quantities.

The most common application for filter-membrane sample holders has always been respirable silica quantification. This is mandated by OSHA and is an extremely common industrial hygiene test. Ambient air is sampled with a fixed or mobile suction system and particles are deposited onto a PVC membrane inside a sealed cartridge. Testing procedures are defined by NIOSH7500 and since this is a total quantification method (not a relative method), it’s critical that the entire sample is measured. Unfortunately, the measurement cannot be completed on the PVC membrane as received. Transferring the sample powder to an Ag membrane is accomplished by dissolving or ashing the PVC away, diluting the remainder in a solvent and depositing it onto the Ag membrane by vacuum filtration. The end result is an extremely low loss of analyte even for very small volumes of material.

This preparation method is also very useful for other types of samples which might have crystalline particulate suspended in a solution. Drying samples can be time-consuming, heating them to boil off liquid can cause phase transitions in the crystalline analyte, and handling dry powder in very small quantities is a very good way to lose material. Vacuum filtration solves all these problems.

 

Our most popular custom sample holder is the SC40F25 which is designed to hold the common 25mm Ag membrane filters used for this type of mounting. The anodized Al body is a time-tested design that works very well and causes almost no interference with the data, unlike the original injection-molded plastic parts. However, the most common method for retaining the membrane has always been to drop a metal support disk behind it and use an ID snap ring to retain both the disk and membrane. This can be a frustrating operation even for experienced hands. Snap rings are hard to control and the high spring tension gouges the inner diameter of the Aluminum body to the point that the holders must be replaced periodically.

After watching so many clients struggling with this system, we thought we could find a better option. The first step was a simple, laser cut acrylic backer instead of the metal disk. The acrylic was thicker which limited the depth to which the snap ring needed to be set. This was an improvement but still required the snap ring.

The next step was 3D printed plugs which could be pushed into the well. These supported the membrane and held it in the plane of diffraction at the same time. A standard pair of pliers was all the was needed to grab the plug and gently rotated it to release the membrane. This seemed like the ideal solution, but we heard from one user who claimed that the plug was causing an interfering peak in his measurements. We’ve been around the block with 3D printed sample holders in general and it’s definitely true that the common thermoplastics used will crystallize when cooled rapidly. This causes lots of problems for routine analysis of powders, but this was the first we’d heard of a peak being visible through an Ag membrane. Perhaps this user had a particularly thin membrane, but regardless, we needed a new solution, both for their lab and our own.

 

Our current solution is a laser cut “spring” backer which again combines the function of retainer and support in one part. The spring is easy to install by hand and can even be removed by hand, but forceps or needle-nose pliers make this easier. These have been working very well so we’re hopeful that this is going to be a long-term solution that we can share with our clients.

 

 

 

Posted by: In: Uncategorized 03 Jan 2018 0 comments Tags: , , , ,

Most of the zero-background sample holders we make are designed with permanently affixed plates. We prefer this dramatically as loose plate are constantly getting dropped, chipped, or lost. However, a permanently affixed plate also gives us the freedom to precisely (within about 0.02mm) set the depth of the plate below the plane of diffraction. This can make a big difference in the results depending upon the volume of powder loaded as the standard “flush mount” puts the plate exactly in the plane of diffraction. This works fine for very small volumes, but it does guaranty the there will be a displacement error of some magnitude regardless of the particle size or volume. For this reason, we always offer custom recessing as an option. The only drawback to the permanently affixed style of mounting is that the offset (or flush mounting height) cannot be changed. Our preferred solution is to simply create a set of holders with various depths to accommodate different sample thicknesses, but we had a request recently for an infinitely variable mounting solution.

Complicating the project is that the holder was to be used in a D2 Phaser with a 6 position autosampler which does not use the same style of base holder as the single-sample variant or any other Bruker XRD that we’re aware of. We discussed several options. The large number of heights needed made multiple holders, spacers, and any other solution that relied on discreet steps unacceptable. The thin-walled sample bases and relatively tight dimensions made a screw-in insert unrealistic as well. The final solution was to build a custom tool for setting the ZBH at a specific depth. This requires the user to work with bare Si plates, but it meets all the design criteria and we’re hopeful that this will work well for them.

The tool is made from acetal (Delrin) plastic which is extremely resistant to chemicals, adhesion, and abrasion. It’s actually an ideal material for threaded parts and machines very well.

A great many factors affect the quality of data one can collect on any given instrument, but there are times when simply holding the aliquot is a major hurdle. We spend a great deal of time working out the best ways to hold odd samples and even create custom hardware to do so in some cases. Click here for some of our other posts related to the various sample holders we work with. Choosing the best sample holder for a given project is one thing, but there are also times when a completely different stage is required.

The most common stage is the simple, single sample stage. This relies on three pins to define the plane of diffraction. The sample holder is pressed against these pins by a spring loaded plunger beneath it.