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xrdquestionperson
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Hello, I have an unusual case in that I am using XRD to study plant skins before and after certain chemical treatments. So the resulting pattern will have a lot of amorphous regions but also some characteristic peaks showing the presence of fatty acids, etc.
Basically I grind everything to a fine powder and pass it through a sieve and use a glass sample holder to run the experiments. However- and this has happened more than once- I get terrible reproducibility; running the same sample under the same conditions gives me wildly different results on different days, some peaks are missing, etc.
I'm new to the technique so maybe there is something I'm missing because I was trained to just put a thin layer of the powder on the sample holder (glass slide, essentially) without anything to hold it in place and to smooth it out with a spatula until it's more or less evenly distributed. I run the tests in ambient conditions if that makes a difference.
Basically I grind everything to a fine powder and pass it through a sieve and use a glass sample holder to run the experiments. However- and this has happened more than once- I get terrible reproducibility; running the same sample under the same conditions gives me wildly different results on different days, some peaks are missing, etc.
I'm new to the technique so maybe there is something I'm missing because I was trained to just put a thin layer of the powder on the sample holder (glass slide, essentially) without anything to hold it in place and to smooth it out with a spatula until it's more or less evenly distributed. I run the tests in ambient conditions if that makes a difference.
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