Design of low profile sample stage

The Italian Neutron Experimental Station, or INES for short, instrument beamline at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Spallation Source recently underwent an upgrade to its sample positioning area to improve the sample handling capability and capacity of the instrument. INES is a powder diffractometer instrument devoted to materials characterization and cultural heritage studies. Due to the types of samples received for cultural heritage studies the instrument scientists wanted to maximize the height of samples that could be scanned with the instrument. This paper covers the in-house design and delivery of a new, two axis, linear positioning stage for INES that due to the addition of a new linear height stage, needed to be as low profile as possible to give the instrument scientists the sample capacity they required.

HRPD-X; a proposed upgrade to the ISIS High-Resolution Powder Diffractometer

HRPD-X is a proposal to completely replace the current high-resolution powder diffractometer (HRPD) at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. The new instrument is expected to deliver a factor of four increase in solid-angle coverage. Taking advantage of new detector technology and coupled with a non-magnetic sample tank and improved incident- and diffracted-beam collimation, the new instrument will substantially improve HRPD’s scientific capabilities to study magnetic structures and behaviour, high-pressure phenomena and supramolecular structures whilst strengthening its performance in already-established areas.

Equatorial aberration of powder diffraction data collected with an Si strip X-ray detector by a continuous-scan integration method

Exact and approximate mathematical formulas of equatorial aberration for powder diffraction data collected with an Si strip X-ray detector in continuous-scan integration mode are presented. An approximate formula is applied to treat the experimental data measured with a commercial powder diffractometer.

POWGEN: rebuild of a third-generation powder diffractometer at the Spallation Neutron Source

The neutron powder diffractometer POWGEN at the Spallation Neutron Source has recently (2017–2018) undergone an upgrade which resulted in an increased detector complement along with a full overhaul of the structural design of the instrument. The current instrument has a solid angular coverage of 1.2 steradians and maintains the original third-generation concept, providing a single-histogram data set over a wide d-spacing range and high resolution to access large unit cells, detailed structural refinements and in situ/operando measurements.