Untangling Unknown Structures in Mixtures

Scientists have come up with a way to determine the structures of individual components in an unknown crystalline powder mixture. By using two existing techniques together, the separate crystal structures can be determined. Powder X-ray Diffraction (PXRD) uses diffraction methods to determine a "fingerprint" for every crystalline structure. This works fine for pure powders, but when a mixture comes into play, the two diffraction patterns can merge making it difficult to determine the components. By pairing this with Band-Target Entropy Minimization (BTEM) in a new method known as the PXRD-BTEM-Rietveld method, it is now possible to pick apart the structures and characterize the unknown components in a powder mixture. This new method could potentially be used in pharmaceuticals by investigating polymorphism.

The article can be found here.