USE OF NEW IMAGE-PLATE TECHNIQUES IN SYNCHROTRON-RADIATION STUDIES OF MATERIALS AND PROCESSES

Synchrotron radiation is used routinely for diffraction measurements on crystalline powders and amorphous materials. The usual method of data collection is to use a diffractometer to scan a detector over a wide angular range, step-wise building up a 1-D diffraction pattern at an appropriate angular resolution. There are a number of drawbacks to this approach: there may well be 2-D information which is being ignored (or confused), and when collecting data at one point the diffracted intensity at all other scan intervals is not being recorded, ie. it is wasted. A 1-D, or preferably 2-D, position sensitive detector is obviously required to optimise data collection. image-plates offer a solution and we report here recent investigations of their use for both powder diffraction and amorphous materials. Gains of 100 in data collection time could be achieved in principle and this suggests the technology could not only improve the efficiency of use of expensive central resources, but could also open up new possibilities for studying materials processing in situ.