August 2007 Newsletter.

Chair's Welcome

This is the first IG Newsletter since I became Chair of the IG Committee, and I'd like to contribute a few thoughts. Many thanks go to the outgoing Chair, Jeremy Karl Cockroft, for his sterling contribution to the IG over the years, both as an officer on the committee and as an active committee member. We're all grateful that Jeremy has continued his involvement with the IG committee, as one of the organisers of our Small Angle Scattering Meeting (more below).

So far in 2007 we have organised two sets of meetings, and have two more meetings planned for the Autumn. At the BCA Spring meeting we had an IG strand of lectures, as usual, and in a break from tradition (and, I hope, the start of a new one), we gave prizes for the best contributed talks at the Young Crystallographers Satellite Meeting. I had the pleasure of being one of the judges at this event, along with Roy Copley & Martin Gill; we were all struck by the high quality of the presentations and the breadth and depth of the topics covered. It was a great way of getting an overview of crystallography-oriented research in the U.K.

In July, the IG held a meeting on Small Angle Scattering at the ILL in Grenoble; our first-ever overseas meeting. I'd like to thank the speakers, delegates and organisers (David Taylor, Richard Morris and Jeremy, from the IG committee and the local organising secretary, Karine Sultan of ILL) for their participation in this meeting.

Later this year we have a Pharmaceutical SIG and the regular Autumn Industrial Group meeting, and these will take place on consecutive days at AstraZeneca in Macclesfield. We are still open to offers of talks for the general Industrial day, so please contact Judith Shackleton if you would like to contribute. We have filled the Pharma program, it promises to be a great day, and details of all these meetings can be found later in this Newsletter.

I hope to see many of you later in the year, in Macclesfield.

Anne Kavanagh, August 2007

Editorial

Welcome to this edition of the BCA Industrial Group's Newsletter. As you'll see it is crammed with reports for the sessions which the Industrial Group organised at this years BCA Spring Meeting which was held at the University of Canterbury. Thank you to the members who took the time to write up these reports.

I would like to remind you that unedited versions of all the reports covered in this Newsletter can be found on the group's web site

Also included is a report for the Small Angle Scattering Special Interest Group Meeting which was held at the ILL, Grenoble in July. The Group can be rightfully proud of what was achieved here - it was our first meeting on 'foreign' soil! Let's hope this isn't our last.

Take a look at the upcoming meetings on page 10. Please support the group by attending these meeting and, even better, volunteering to help would be much appreciated.

Newsletter and Web Site Content

We continually try to improve the content of both the Newsletter and web pages and would like to ask you to submit articles etc.

Do you use web sites for your day to day work in XRD and XRF? If yes, then which sites do you visit, let us know and send us a paragraph about what you use the site for and why you like it.

Do you have any hints and tips to share with the rest of the membership? They could be on anything relevant to XRD and XRF covering areas such as sample preparation, calibration, measurement strategies, results handling, time saving measures. Let us know.

That's it for now. Enjoy your Newsletter.

Mark Farnworth - Pilkington Group Limited, Editor