Modern powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) systems must nowadays be able to meet the challenges faced by multi-user facilities. They must be able to measure a wide variety of sample types in different configurations without sacrificing data quality or measurement efficiency. Instruments must be capable not only of routine XRD measurements, but also offer more advanced capabilities such as grazing incidence XRD, non-ambient XRD, small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), pair distribution function (PDF) analysis, and much more. The recently introduced XRDynamic 500 automated multipurpose powder X-ray diffractometer from Anton Paar (Figure 1) has set new standards in terms of data quality, automation and efficiency for laboratory powder diffractometers. It is the ideal tool to face these types of challenges by offering a versatile, modular and future-proof platform for all types of analyses.
 
The core of XRDynamic 500 is the TruBeam™ concept. TruBeam™ comprises a large goniometer radius and evacuated optics units, automatic change of the beam geometry and all optics components, and automated instrument and sample alignment routines. All of these features combine to deliver outstanding data quality (in terms of both resolution and signal-to-noise ratio) that can be measured with high efficiency in a straight-forward manner; even users new to XRD can measure excellent quality XRD data every time. The high level of automation means that you can perform measurements on one or many samples with different geometries and instrument configurations in one batch with no user intervention needed.
 
Application examples with a focus on advanced methods such as non-ambient XRD, SAXS, PDF analysis will be presented to showcase the wide variety of possibilities that now exist for laboratory powder XRD systems.