Proposals

Abstract

This proposal renews STF proposal 2016-58. The funding from STF proposal 2016-58 expires September 2021. We propose to purchase two five-year renewal licenses to MDI Jade Pro x-ray diffraction analysis software and two five year renewal licenses to ICDD PDF-4 2021 x-ray diffraction database that includes annual updates for the five years. X-ray diffraction (XRD) is a nondestructive analytical technique used to gain information about materials' atomic crystal structure. A typical XRD measurement generates a x-y graph that shows diffracted beam intensity as a function of the diffraction angle 2-theta. With the help of MDI Jade Pro and PDF-4, students and researchers can take this XRD data and extract information about a material’s properties including its structure, phase, lattice parameters, crystallinity, crystallite size, material strain, etc. These material properties that can be gleaned from careful analysis of XRD data influence their performance in critical fields such as energy storage, biomedicine, and aerospace engineering. Without the JADE software and PDF database, students and researchers would have to use inefficient web interfaces to try to analyze their data. For this reason, we believe it is necessary to have access to the JADE software and the PDF database. Yearly updates to the database will also allow our students and researchers to have the most extensive, precise, and up to date information (over 400,000 datasets come with the database). The software and database are licensed through hardware USB-keys and will not be eligible for the key server. However, for convenience, the database and software will be stationed in the MAF (Molecular Analysis Facility- an instrumentation user facility located in the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Building) and the MSE User Facility (Materials Science & Engineering- located in Mueller/Roberts Hall). These user facilities house two of the XRD instruments on campus that are available to all students. After students and researchers get trained on how to operate the XRD instrument in these facilities, they will be shown how to analyze data using JADE and identify their sample composition and refine its crystal structure using the PDF-4 database.