Abstract
X-ray absorption spectroscopy is an element-specific technique for probing the local atomic-scale environment around an absorber atom. It is widely used to investigate the structures of liquids and solids, being especially valuable for characterization of solid-supported catalysts. Reported cell designs are limited in capabilities—to fluorescence or transmission and to static or flowing atmospheres, or to vacuum. Our goal was to design a robust and widely applicable cell for catalyst characterizations under all these conditions—to allow tracking of changes during genesis and during operation, both under vacuum and in reactive atmospheres. Herein, we report the design of such a cell and a demonstration of its operation both with a sample under dynamic vacuum and in the presence of gases flowing at temperatures up to 300 °C, showing data obtained with both fluorescence and transmission detection. The cell allows more flexibility in catalyst characterization than any reported.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 073108 |
| Journal | Review of Scientific Instruments |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 26 2016 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: We thank A. Cobb and J. Roach of the University of California,
Davis, Biological and Agricultural Engineering Machine
Shop, for design consultation and cell fabrication, and
R. Davis of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource
(SSRL) for helpful discussions.We thank SSRL for beam time
(beamline 4-1). The work was funded by the King Abdullah
University of Science and Technology and by the U.S. Department
of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences
(Grant No. FG02-04ER15513). Use of SSRL, SLAC National
Accelerator Laboratory, is supported by the U.S. Department
of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (Grant
No. DE-AC02-76SF00515). A. S. Hoffman was supported by
a fellowship from Chevron.