Our new Small and Wide X-Ray Scattering system!

After a year-long procurement process the Soft Matter Group has finally received its Anton Paar SAXSPoint 5.0 system for Small- and Wide-Angle X-Ray Scattering analysis. This £400,000 equipment is one of a handful of similar systems in the UK and provides the University of Leeds with access to an on-site laboratory-scale equivalent to a National Synchrotron facility.

With this equipment we can now quickly and effectively characterise the structures and order present in a wide range of soft materials including polymers, composites, colloids, lipids, liquid crystals, and supramolecular systems. The detector can move from between 40 millimetres to 1.6 metres away from a sample being studied, meaning we can characterise structures and orders on length-scales ranging from 0.06 to 300 nanometers.

The sample environments available allow for materials to be placed in a variety of capillary, solids, and liquids sample holders and tested between -20 and 120 °C. Thin film materials can also be studied in Grazing Incidence, and, unique outside of a national facility, a Rheometer module allows for simultaneous characterisation of the structure and rheological behaviour of a material in response to applied shear deformations. This latter ability is critical for developing better processing technologies – for example in functionalised and sustainable polymers, new domestic product formulations, food technologies, or engineered biological hydrogels.

Ongoing work in the Soft Matter group that is already benefitting from this equipment includes the characterisation of mesophases and nanostructures in liquid crystals and liquid crystalline elastomers; the optimisation of industrially relevant semi-crystalline co-polymer systems; the structure of novel so-called vitrimers, polymers with dynamic cross-links, and the development of sustainable cellulose-based biopolymer composite systems.

This equipment is available to use by those at any research institution and to those in industry. For more information about the equipment’s capabilities and access to the equipment please visit our Facilities page: X-Ray Scattering.