THE RIETVELD METHOD
Rietveld Refinement, Rietveld Analysis, Rietveld Technique, Rietveld Calculation,
Rietveld Quantitative Phase Analysis
Rietveld Refinement, Rietveld Analysis, Rietveld Technique, Rietveld Calculation,
Rietveld Quantitative Phase Analysis
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert von Szent-Györgyi (Nobel prize-winner in 1937)
Materials are
essential to our
technological society: semiconductors in the electronic industry,
zeolites as catalysts in the petrochemical industry, ceramics in
medicine and
engineering, and, possibly in the future, high-temperature
superconductors in electrical engineering.....
In order to understand the properties of these materials and
to
improve them, the atomic structure has to be
known. An effective way to do this is by means of diffraction
techniques using neutrons from nuclear reactors and particle
accelerators or X-rays from X-ray tubes and synchrotrons. The
single crystal diffraction technique, using relatively large
crystals of the material, gives a set of separate data from
which the structure can be obtained.
However, most materials of technical interest cannot grow large
crystals, so one has to resort to the powder diffraction
technique using
material in the form of very small crystallites. The drawback
of this conventional powder method is that the diffraction peaks grossly overlap, thereby preventing proper determination of the
structure. The "Rietveld Method" creates a virtual separation of these overlapping
peaks, thereby
allowing an
accurate determination of the structure.
The method has been so successful that nowadays the structure
of materials, in the form of powders, is routinely being
determined, nearly as accurately as the results obtained by
single
crystal
diffraction techniques. An even more widely used application of the
method is in determining the components of chemical mixtures. This
quantitative phase analysis is now
routinely used in industries ranging from cement
factories to the oil industry.
The success of the method can be gauged by the publication of more than
a thousand scientific papers yearly using it:
Results of a search on Google Scholar with the search string: ("rietveld refinement" OR "rietveld analysis" OR "rietveld method" OR "rietveld technique" OR "rietveld calculation" OR "rietveld quantitative phase analysis" OR "rietveld program") for the Rietveld Method and the search string: (rietveld AND "quantitative phase analysis") for the Rietveld Quantitative Phase Analysis (RQPA).
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Rietveld at
the neutron powder diffractometer at the High Flux Reactor of the
Energy
Reseach
Foundation ECN in Petten, The Netherlands. (1987)
Hugo
M.
Rietveld was
born
in The Hague, The Netherlands, on 7
March 1932. After completing Grammar School he went to Australia and
studied physics at the University of Western
Australia in
Perth.
2003
Dr.
Robert L. Snyder presents Dr. Rietveld with the Barrett Award on behalf of the Denver
X-ray
Conference Organizing Committee in Denver, USA, 6 August 2003.
2004
Mrs. Marie
van
Rossen, mayoress of Alkmaar, presents the decoration of the royal honour
of Officer in the
Order of Oranje-Nassau to Dr. Rietveld for his outstanding contribution
to the field of chemistry in Alkmaar, The Netherlands, 29 October 2004.
2010
Prof. Paolo Scardi, Chairman of the International Committee of the European Powder Diffraction Conference,
presents Dr. Rietveld with the 2010 EPDIC Award for Distinguished Powder Diffractionists,
in Darmstadt, Germany, 27 August 2010.
