A while ago I posted the raytraced design of a liquid sample holder that doubled as an oven. Here’s the picture of the final product, and I’ve been told it can even hold water (although solvents with a lower viscosity do leak through).  For those not familiar with this design, it contains a small amount of liquid between two thin mica plates separated by an o-ring. The thickness of the o-ring determines the pathlength. This was designed so that even for a small pathlength (i.e. 0.5 mm), an X-Ray beam with 1mm diameter could be used. At the bottom of the picture, an o-ring is visible, as well as two screws to tighten the device, and one piece of plastic intended for torque removal upon tightening (so that the windows are not affected by torque). The device goes up to 250 degrees when heat probes and a thermocouple are inserted.

Herewith a small program I wrote a while ago and some documentation on how it’s built up.

The Matlab program can calculate the scattering pattern of a superellips of revolution. I hope it is of some use to some of you, if only for satisfying curiosity. The program runs in Matlab, opens a GUI, which requires the input of five variables.

The first two dictate the limits in q that one is interested in. The minimum q value determines the maximum size of the real-space box, and the distance between the minimum q and the maximum q determines the pixel resolution in real space. Good values for these are, for example, 0.01 for the minimum q and 2 for the maximum q. 

The three other variables determine the size and shape of the superellips-of-revolution. The superellips is generated  with width a (in Angstrom), height b, and curvature r. The ellips is then revolved around the vertical axis to generate the ellips-of-revolution. A nice value for these are, for example, a=20, b=100, r=4. 

Please see the attached documentation and have fun running the program. The program is distributed under the GPL V3 license. geomsuperell.pdfsuperellips-of-revolution scattering pattern simulator