50 Years of the Rigaku MiniFlex Benchtop XRD

By Dr. Cameron Chai and Peter Airey, AXT PTY LTD

This year marks the 50th since Rigaku pioneered the benchtop XRD. At the time, the concept was revolutionary with the system being significantly smaller and more affordable than anything before it. As such, it made XRD so much more accessible, bringing it out of highend research and into smaller labs and industry and is now referenced in more than 43,000 papers and patents.

Rigaku have continued to innovate to ensure they maintained a leadership position and the MiniFlex has registered several firsts:

• 1995 - First benchtop XRD to run on a Windows PC

• 2005 - First to benefit from a fast 1D detector

• 2010 - First to be powered by a powerful 600W X-ray generator

• 2017 - First to be compatible with a 2D detector

The MiniFlex is amongst Rigaku’s best selling product lines around the world. With its ability to generate publication quality data, it has helped XRD become more widely utilised with the ability to determine such things as:

• Crystalline phase identification (phase ID) and quantification

• Percent (%) crystallinity

• Crystallite size and strain

• Lattice parameter refinement

• Rietveld refinement

• Molecular structure

In Australia, the MiniFlex has become an important teaching instrument helping groom students for life in both research and industry. Meanwhile, there are also numerous installations in industry where they are used in testing and QC labs, with options such as automatic sample changers, high temperature stages and various sample stages that can be added that make it suitable for a range of applications such as materials and chemical identification, development of battery materials, geology and mineralogy, pharmaceuticals as well as education and research.