Dear Othman, You should check if the synthesised grains in your powder are chemically homogeneous of if they show any zonation due to growth processes. Variable chemistry will cause broadened and/or asymmetric peaks
Are vacancies known to occur in this class of compounds? The conditions of preparation might be important (synthesis in air or something else?). Uwe Von: rietveld_l-requ...@ill.fr [mailto:rietveld_l-requ...@ill.fr] Im Auftrag von Othman Al Bahri Gesendet: Montag, 19. Dezember 2016 09:54 An: rietveld_l@ill.fr Betreff: Stoichiometry and occupancy fractions of solid solutions Dear all, I've made a series of solid solution powders using a solid state reaction in the form A2B3-xCxO12 at x= 0.5 steps. A2B3O12 is orthorhombic while A2C3O12 is monoclinic. I'm refining the XRD data to find the atomic distribution of the solute. I've constrained the sum of the occupancy fractions for each relevant site to equal 1. At low concentrations of the solute, I initially set the solute's occupancy fractions to 0 and keep the solvent's occupancy at 1 then refine the fractions (after following the usual Rietveld refinement steps). This seems to give reasonable occupancy fraction values (no big numbers or negative values) but the stoichiometry is way off. This is probably because each site has different Wykoff multiplicities so constraining the sum of each site's fractions to 1 is insufficient. Let's assume that I knew the stoichiometry from Mass Spectroscopy or XPS - is there a way to constrain the stiochiometry in a Rietveld refinement? I'm using GSAS-II and comfortable with FullProf but feel free to give advice for any other open-source software. I've seen a few papers where the authors mention, typically in the supplementary info, that their refinements' stoichiometry was off and that it should be ignored. However I'm not comfortable with this approach and would appreciate your advice. This is my first time working with solid solutions so please feel free to offer any general advice on what I should be careful with. I've tested for phase mixtures (insolubility) by visually comparing my XRD patterns with the sum of simulated XRD patterns of molar mixtures and through Rietveld refinements with two phases. The system I'm working with has been reported but the original authors didn't do Rietveld refinements - they were interested in physical property measurements. Kind Regards, Othman
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