Digitization of imaging plates from Guinier powder X‐ray diffraction cameras

Abstract

A Guinier camera equipped with an imaging plate is used to investigate and eliminate the sources of instrumental errors affecting the quality of the obtained scanned Guinier data. A program with a graphical user interface is presented which converts the data of the scanned images into different standard file formats for powder X‐ray patterns containing intensities, their standard deviations and the diffraction angles. The program also allows for manual and automatic correction of the 2gθ scale against a known reference material. It is shown using LaB6 that the exported X‐ray diffraction patterns provide a 2gθ scale reproducible enough to allow for averaging diffractograms obtained from different exposures of the imaging plate for the same sample. As shown on a mixture of NaCl and sodalite, the quality of the produced data is sufficient for Rietveld refinement. The software including source code is made available under a free software license.

A program for the digitization of Guinier powder diffraction images is described, which works with images from both optical and laser scanners. Thus, processing of data from storage‐phosphor‐based imaging plates and Ag‐based photographic films is possible.