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Industrial Group of the BCA
August 2003 NewsletterContents Download a
Thanks to Forthcoming EventsBCA INDUSTRIAL GROUP AUTUMN FORUM BCA SPRING MEETING, MANCHESTER. 6th - 8th April
2004 EditorialWelcome to this latest issue of the IG newsletter. It's been a relatively quiet summer for the Industrial Group after the excellent Spring Meeting at York. I'm sure that those of you who were able to attend the meeting enjoyed the lectures, posters and all the other events. The format was slightly different to previous years with everything crammed into three days. This made it a busy time for delegates moving between the various parallel sessions. Due to work commitments, I was able to take advantage of the new one-day registration and thoroughly enjoyed my brief visit on the Wednesday. The Industrial Group has also decided to change the usual format of the Autumn meeting to a two day meeting at Birkbeck College, London. With both joint and parallel sessions, it promises to be an excellent follow up to the event held near Coventry in 1999. The facilities are excellent and there are plenty of hotels in the immediate area. It also offers the chance for delegates to extend their stay into the weekend with an opportunity to experience the many attractions London has to offer. Please make a note of the dates in your diary NOW. Would you like to describe your typical working day or your X-ray diffraction career? This is your chance!!! I am always looking for new ideas for articles to go in the newsletter. Two ideas I would like to think about are:
The first would involve answering a series of questions talking about your career in xrd such as earliest recollections and experiences, changes in xrd since you first started, and any humorous anecdotes. Finally perhaps a question on your thoughts about the future. The second would involve a description of a typical day at the office/lab. I know that this might not be easy but most people do follow some kind of routine. Please let me know your thoughts and please feel free to put forward any other suggestions for newsletter features. Please contact any member of the Industrial Group Committee (see back page for contact details) with any suggestions for future meetings, offers of presentations, offers of hosting a meeting and nominations for the Committee or the group award. Articles Wanted: Why not put pen to paper and write a short article for our next Newsletter. There are lots of examples to give you some ideas in our Hints & Tips section on the WEB. Don't forget, if you attend a conference, please send in an article about it. We are also looking to expand the range of Industrial Applications of XRD on our WEB Site. All we need are a few well chosen pictures and a few words. How about something on CEMENTS, MINERALS, MUSEUMS, PHOTOGRAPHY, DETERGENTS, PIGMENTS, POLYMERS Philip Holdway 
European XRPD Standards PublishedFor the last few years I have been reporting to the UK powder diffraction community in various ways about the (slow) progress in writing standards for XRPD. It may come as a surprise to those who thought it would never happen, but the first two documents have now been published. In UK, they have British Standard numbers, i.e. 'BS' in front of the European numbers. The published standards are: BS EN 13925-1:2003Non-destructive testing. X-ray diffraction from polycrystalline and amorphous materials. General principles. BS EN 13925-2:2003Non-destructive testing. X-ray diffraction from polycrystalline and amorphous materials. Procedures. The standards are not cheap to buy, particularly at full price, but your organisation may have less costly access to them. You can find more information on the BSI standards website: http://www.bsi-global.com/Corporate/Standards.xalter. One interesting feature of the 'Procedures' document is the set of equations for basic diffractometry calculations. You will find most of these elsewhere, but this set is unique (I think) in that units are provided. The following instalment on 'Instruments' should be published within the next year. An interesting aspect of this standard is the framework provided for describing and specifying diffractometers. Further instalments on 'Reference Materials' and 'Terminology' should appear soon after. Work is also in progress towards a standard on Residual Stress. Thanks again to all those who have contributed to writing the documents, and with anticipation to those who will contribute to the remaining parts. Steve Norval
1st Annual Biomaterials WorkshopShrivenham 17th March 2003 This Biomaterials Workshop was hosted by Cranfield University (Shrivenham campus) and held on 17th March 2003. It was the inaugural launch of a series of such meetings designed particularly to introduce new researchers to more established workers in the field and present new & emerging areas. The meeting attracted more than 80 delegates from as far away Barcelona and Belgium. Delegates were welcomed to the workshop by the head of the sponsoring University department, Professor Cliff Friend and the president of the ABW council, Susan Etok. The first presentation of the initial morning session was delivered by Professor Peter Marquis (University of Birmingham) who comprehensively described conventional and new material systems for use as dental restorative materials. He convinced everyone that finding alternatives to metallic amalgams is a high technology challenge and described the potential benefits of newly developed nano-particulates as they can provide the material quality and aesthetics required. The subsequent paper, delivered by Professor Andrew Lloyd (University of Brighton), presented an intriguing method for enhancing osteointegration through exploitation of part of the natural mineralisation process. In particular the role of calcium-binding phospholipids within matrix vesicles was described and Professor Lloyd showed how such lipids could, in vitro, self assemble into 3-D gels that may provide a suitable environment for rapid calcification. Different fabrication routes to produce apatite coatings were expertly discussed by Dr David Grant (University of Nottingham). In particular, coatings formed by plasma spraying and laser ablation were compared with respect to their chemistry, surface topography and cell interaction. Dr Grant emphasised the need to apply absorption corrections in diffraction measurements of crystallinity and pointed out the lack of any ASTM methodology in this respect. Subsequently, Dr Jonathon Knowles provided a persuasive description of the use of phosphate based glasses as biomaterials, and explained how the solubility of such materials can be significantly modified through the addition of Na or Ca ions. Dr Knowles explained that these glasses are relatively soluble in contrast to the bioglasses traditionally employed as biomaterials. He went on to show that, by annealing the glasses to crystallization, the subsequent phase mix can be employed to determine the amorphous structure. One use of such glasses is as 3-D fibre network structures to support cell growth systems. The final presentation of the morning session was provided by Dr Peter Wilshaw (University of Oxford) who described an elegant and novel approach to formation of a strongly adherent bioactive coating based upon a nanoporous alumina ceramic. Dr Wilshaw explained that the advantage of this technology is that pore diameter can be easily controlled and that these pores are typically ~0.2 micrometres, which is significantly lower than conventional porous materials used for biomaterial applications. Very low dissolution rates in culture media & osteoblasts were reported (0.03% in 10 days) and the rate of Al release is also apparently very small. Cell interaction with these surfaces was illustrated and the potential for loading the pores with bioactive materials discussed. Following lunch, delegates had the luxury of being able to 'mix and match' between 3, carefully orchestrated parallel sessions. The talks were diverse, from an industry perspective of plasma sprayed coatings (Robert Scott, Biomet-Merck) to bone fragility & its causes (Peter Zioupos, Cranfield University) and an introduction to the medical devices faraday partnership (Faye Smith, MDFP). The final 2 formal presentations of the day were from Professors Joe Franks and Jim Elliott. Professor Franks (Brunel University) described a room temperature fabrication route for the formation of diamond like carbon coatings with high substrate adherence. These were described as being hard and flexible and good for preventing thrombus formation. Finally, Professor Elliott (Queen Mary), who has been described as one of the most notable pioneers in apatite structural chemistry, carefully described the key ionic packing arrangement of the apatite lattice and pointed out that most of the space is occupied by phosphate ions packed into a pseudo-HCP arrangement. He went on to illustrate several ionic substitution possibilities and, in particular, carbonate substitution into phosphate and hydroxyl sites. He finished by indicating that apatites can still produce surprising results and described how his recent work has shown evidence of formate substitutions. Overall, the day offered a broad and diverse programme that reflected the range of interests of the biomaterials community. All the lectures were of high quality and well received by all the delegates. A lunchtime poster session (best poster award going to J. Blaker, Imperial College for Silver doped bioactive glass coated sutures for tissue engineering and wound healing applications), and a cake cutting ceremony also served to 'entertain' the delegates. The success of this first workshop was due principally to its professional organisation and delegate & speaker enthusiasm. There is no doubt that these workshops will continue to provide a high quality forum for encouraging collaborations and promoting awareness & understanding in the field. Further details of the next workshop will be announced in due course at www.cranfield-biomaterials.com. K.D. Rogers
Bruker - AXS Ltd User Group MeetingYew Lodge Hotel, Kegworth, About 40 delegates were present, probably slightly down on previous meetings. A reflection perhaps of hard times; at least for industrial users. After gathering at lunchtime, the meeting began with a series of presentations by users. First up was Darren Derbyshire (Aventis) who spoke on XRPD Method for the quantification of Anhydrous API in a Monohydrate API/Anhydrous API/Carrier Mixture. Darren explained that existing methods were not accurate enough due to the presence of Lactose. His method involved removing the lactose, which then allowed improved observation of the anhydrous peak. Using peak areas anhydrous levels as low as 1% could now be determined. Louise Male (University of Bath) spoke about Structure Solution of Large Organometallic compounds from Powder XRD Data. Louise spoke about Pt containing compounds whose optoelectric properties were affected by intermolecular interactions. She explained the method of structural solution, which involved a series of steps starting with indexing of powder patterns through to Rietveld refinement. Both lab x-ray and synchrotron radiation were used and her results were very encouraging. Judith Shackleton (University of Manchester Materials Science Centre), spoke on Lots of Stress in the Materials Science centre. Judith spoke about the measurement of residual stresses using x-rays at Manchester using a 2-dimensional detector. Judith explained why there is a need to measure these stresses in engineering components; in particular to improve our understanding of premature failure through fatigue. Judith mentioned other techniques, which can be used to measure RS such as hole drilling, magnetic methods and sectioning. She talked about the various advantages and disadvantages of the different methods and explained the use of the 2-D detector. Judith finished with some examples such as very large castings and railway lines where portable methods are very useful. The morning session ended with a talk by Duncan Gregory concerned with Powder Diffraction of Air Sensitve Materials. He described a cell, which had been built to look at materials that are hydroscopic and air sensitive. Ba2N, Ca2N and SrTiN2 were examples of compounds investigated. After a coffee break, David Beveridge (Ilford) spoke about Applications of X-ray Diffraction in the Imaging Industry. David began by explaining that despite the rapid rise in digital photography, silver halide work will remain important for sometime to come. He then went on to explain the wide range of samples investigated using x-ray diffraction from various types of inks and media (eg paper) work on pigments many of which do not have patterns in the diffraction database. Mary Vickers (University of Cambridge) spoke on Is Reflectometry Useful? Mary explained relectometry and the type of information it can give, particularly in the case of multilayered materials. She showed some typical data for InGaN/GaN and explained how the information could be extracted and the importance of modelling. The final part of her presentation dealt with instrumentation; in particular the need for accurate alignment. Anne Kavanagh (AstraZeneca) was next up speaking on using Xrpd to Detect Crystalline in Amorphous Drug. She explained that amorphous drugs work better because they are more soluble in water. Over time amorphous form will crystallise. This will be affected by storage conditions. Anne showed that one way around this was to form a solid dispersion in a polymer. She went on to show some examples and typical data collected and how modifying this enabled limits of detection down to 1% to be obtained. The final talk of the day was given by Gordon Barr, (University of Glasgow), on SNAP 1D Pattern Matching and Polymorph Hunting. The program deals with quantitative and semi-quantitative determination of unknowns and deals with factors such as Peak shift and overlap, texture and poor data quality. He then showed an example of quantitative analysis (the BCA IG round robin samples) where he achieved the best results. Finally, the program can be used analyse other x-y data (eg. IR). Delegates then had dinner followed by a get-together in the bar, where everyone had an enjoyable time. The last session on Tuesday morning involved a number of presentations by Bruker concerning new developments. These included a humidity and temperature system and high temperature chambers. Chris Cowden spoke about compliance issues and the morning ended with a presentation on Combinatorial Screening. After another excellent lunch, everyone departed. Thanks to Bruker AXS for a very useful meeting. Phil Holdway Newsletter Mailing list.To keep cost down and to ensure that the newsletter gets to the appropriate people it is essential that we know your correct address. Also if there is a more appropriate contact in your organisation or if you no longer require a copy please let us know by contacting any of the committee officers. If you would like an e-mail notification of the WEB posting of future IG Newsletters then send an E-mail to [email protected] - with the title SUBSCRIBE WEB NEWS |
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