X-ray Diffraction (XRD) is a powerful nondestructive technique for characterizing crystalline materials. While most other analytical techniques provide elemental or molecular information from a sample, XRD is unique in providing a wide variety of information on structures, crystalline phases, preferred crystal orientations (texture), and other structural parameters such as crystallite size, percent crystallinity, strain, stress, and crystal defects.
XRD has a very wide range of applications, across many sample types and materials. Please see our XRD application notes for more specific examples. A typical XRD application is phase-ID. Shown below is the diffraction pattern from a TiO2 sample.
The XRD results in figure 1 show that the sample contains both the Rutile (31.4%) and Anatase (68.6%) phases of TiO2. Compositional results would (ideally) show a 2:1 ratio of O:Ti, but these different phases of TiO2 have different physical and electronic properties so knowing which phase is present can be crucial.