I am trying to measure the crystalline silica content of a powder in a fast and economical fashion. The identified method should have resolution down to 0.05 wt%. I welcome any suggestions, thoughts, or experience. Thank you in advance.
The obvious choice for quantifying crystallinity would be XRD. However I would avoid XRD in this case as it is not possible to reach that level of precision. I would be very interested if you find any technique that can do this!
Dear Ian,
as Ian J Slipper proposed the best technique to identify crystalline type of material is XRD (in various techniques). However a reliable precision down to 0,5‰ under the constraint of short measurement time is not possible to my opinon.
Sorry, but such high precision, short measurement time and high throughput exclude themselves.
I appreciate the responses.
We have used PIXE in the past to measure the silicon content and then used that to estimate worst case scenario crystalline silica content (i.e. 100% of the silicon is in the form of crystalline silica). However, this process may not meet the economical and high-throughput needs. I appreciate the insights thus far and welcome any other suggestions.
Dear Ian,
As Ian J Slipper and Gerhard Martens proposed, the best technique to use is probably XRD. I would have also suggested Raman spectroscopy but I don't know the exact resolution of the technique.
You can try to prepare set of standards with different content of silica and than use chemometry methods (e.g. PLS) in order to increase precision,
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