Estimation of crystallite size distribution by powder X-ray diffraction peak analysis

Abstract

A new method to evaluate the distribution as well as the average of crystallite size from powder X-ray diffraction data is presented. The Kα2-subpeak and instrumental aberrations are simultaneously removed from the experimental data by a method based on deconvolution of the instrumental function. Evaluation of the size distribution is achieved by fitting of theoretical peak profile for lognormally distributed spherical particles to the observed data. The method has been applied to the powder X-ray diffraction data of a SiC powder sample.