A new minicomputer search/match/identify program for qualitative phase analysis with the powder diffractometer

Several new techniques have been developed for multi-phase identification using X-ray powder diffractometry. Among these are (1) automatic correction for common systematic errors, (2) probability-based scoring, (3) window-less searching and matching, and (4) additive phase isolation. These new approaches to old problems are appropriate for implementation on a minicomputer and a program has been written which incorporates them. Results obtained from this work have demonstrated success in solving identification problems under a wide variety of circumstances, many of which were previously considered very difficult for computer algorithms. This paper is the first of two intended to describe the new algorithms and their implementation in the program, SANDMAN.