Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s the lifeblood of a well-functioning analytical lab. A few days ago, Todd was preparing a water chiller for shipping and washed out some corrosion products with acetic acid. The resulting solution was left in a beaker over the weekend and when we returned, he noticed that it had formed rather large crystals. So he did what any curious person with a lab full of XRD instrumentation would do. He ground it up into a fine powder and ran it through a D4 Endeavor. The resulting pattern was definitive and made complete sense given the brass metals involved in the corrosion product and the acetic acid solution.
The data was imported into MDI Jade Pro for phase identification. Jade makes it very easy to take the analysis all the way through whole pattern fitting (WPF/Rietveld) when paired with the COD or ICDD PDF-4 databases. I generated a full report even though the data was not nearly the quality we would usually require for this type of analysis for a client.