Computer-controlled high-temperature single-crystal X-ray diffraction experiments and temperature calibration

Abstract

This work provides a simple way to operate and calibrate single-crystal gas flow heaters that use heating currents up to 10 A. Devices used for this task are an I-7019R data acquisition interface (ICP DAS Co. Ltd, Hsinchu, Taiwan) and an SDP-2210 power unit (Manson Engineering Industrial Ltd, Hong Kong; I max = 10 A, V max = 20 V), which are both connected to one computer. The presented open source software htcontrol (http://htcontrol.sourceforge.net) is able to control the heating current and to monitor the temperature, which allows automated calibrations. In particular, this work targets Stoe IPDS II diffractometer systems with a Heatstream high-temperature (HT) device. The extra hard- and software enables computer-controlled HT data collection series, which are performed utilizing the WinXpose software (Stoe & Cie GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany). New developments in WinXpose allow non-interactive data collections, which are controlled by means of an XML file specifying the measurement conditions.