Polymer materials have a wide range of applications in all aspects of society today, in fact, almost every application requires specific and often different properties. These properties are mainly determined by the structure of the polymer material. A simple and fast way to perform this screening is to refine using X-ray diffraction https://www.tongdaxrd.com/product-list/x-ray-single-crystal-diffractometer(XRD) combined with full spectrum analysis.

Identification of material types and polymorphisms

After analysis, the obtained results were compared with the ICDD PDF4+ organic database, and the results showed and confirmed for high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and isotactic polypropylene.

Crystallinity 

By using MDI JADE, crystallinity can be directly determined by a standardless refinement method. This method involves deconvolution of the diffraction pattern by the Rietveld method to directly determine the strength of the amorphous contribution.

Polymorphism and grain size

The collected data were compared with the ICDD PDF4+ organic database, highlighting mainly β-PP (blue) and trace amounts of α-PP (grey). It was found that β-PP (33nm) and α-PP (10nm) had different domain sizes.

Additives and pigments

In the example given here, XRD was applied to a resin sample with embedded Al and TiO2 (rutile) particles, quantifying the amorphous content of 98% (XRF:98%), 0.9%TiO2 (XRF:0.74%), and 1.1%Al (XRF:1.16%).