Innovative hardware concept for ED instrumentation

ELDICO Scientific, a Swiss manufacturer of electron diffraction instrumentation, is presenting its new product concept on the 32nd European Crystallographic Meeting (ECM32). Europe’s biggest gathering of the crystallographic community takes place from 18th to 23rd of August in Vienna with more than 1.100 international visitors. With a disruptive horizontal design and an innovative probe handling mechanism, the dedicated Electron Diffractometer will support crystallographers to produce important structural information faster, with better quality and at lower cost.

Future users of ELDICO instrumentation are research institutes in academia and industry, pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations, agrochemical companies (pesticides, crop protection and fertilizer) as well as research and manufacturing companies in the Advanced Materials sector.

Dr. Tim Grüne, Head of the Centre for X-ray Structure Analysis, Faculty of Chemistry University of Vienna: “The application of electron diffraction in crystallography is a radical innovation. It opens up perspectives for preparative chemistry and pharmacy, electrochemistry, agrochemistry and specialty chemistry that were unimaginable until recently.”

So far, ED has been done in TEMs that are modified, resulting in challenging experiments and limited datasets, yet, structures could be obtained from samples in the range of merely tens of nanometres, that were unsolvable with either conventional or even synchrotron X-ray radiation.

Dr. Gunther Steinfeld, CTO, ELDICO: “We enable crystallographers in academia and industry to enter the sub-µm regime so they can analyse nano-crystalline particles directly. By making crystallization of large crystals obsolete, nowadays the most critical bottleneck, redundant new substances can be tested for their commercial potential faster and more efficiencly.”

ELDICO electron diffractometer / Key facts:

• Sample size from 10 to 1000 nm
• Radically simplified EM design
• Improved goniometer
• R1 below 10%

ELDICO is partnering with world leading suppliers and integration partners among AXILON (Cologne, DE), Bruker (Karlsruhe, DE), and Dectris (Baden, CH). The launch of the first small batch series is expected for July 2020.