Rigaku is pleased to announce the release of CSDA, a powerful new tool for determining average crystallite size and size distribution.
It is well known that the physical and chemical properties of nanoparticles change remarkably with variations in particle size. For this reason, methods for determining particle size are important for investigating the correlation between the particle sizes of a nanomaterial and its properties. It is frequently difficult to synthesize particles of uniform size, so it becomes necessary to evaluate not only the average size, but also the size distribution.
A “crystallite” is a small region of a solid which can be considered a single crystal, and in general, a “particle” is composed of one or more crystallites. Therefore, “crystallite size” is normally smaller than “particle size”. The simplest method for calculating crystallite size is the Scherrer method, in which crystallite size is calculated from the width of an X-ray diffraction peak. However, the average size obtained using the Scherrer equation can be misleading, particularly when the crystallite size distribution of a sample is broad and asymmetric. CSDA overcomes this limitation by simultaneously analyzing both the width and the overall shape of a peak.