August 2009 Newsletter.

Chair's Message

The Industrial Group has had a busy and productive half-year, with a big contribution to the Spring meeting, and plans well-advanced for the Autumn meeting this year. Then in 2010 we hope to have a joint XRF/XRD meeting, and a Pharma meeting, on top of our sessions at the BCA Spring Meeting. Details of all these meetings will be found on the website, and please remember that we're always happy to receive suggestions for meeting topics.

In February 2009, Judith Shackleton organised a meeting with the British Society for Strain Measurement, held at Manchester University. At this year's Spring Meeting the IG was very involved with several great sessions. We had a full parallel strand on XRF, covering a multitude of areas: portable instruments and environmental applications, to name but two, and the IG Plenary was given by Nick Marsh on the subject of Environmental Applications of XRF and XRD. The other IG sessions in this year's programs comprised sessions on pharmaceutical topics and two joint sessions with the BACG. I'd like to thank all our speakers, the IG Committee, and Nick Blagden of Bradford University for this year's IG program.

Looking forward to the rest of the year, Mark Farnworth is organising the IG Autumn meeting, to be held on Nov 5th, at the 'World of Glass' museum in St. Helens. There will be an opportunity to look around the museum, which contains a wealth of exhibits, including the renowned Pilkington glass collection.

Last, but not least, we have had recent elections to the Committee. I'd like to welcome Margaret West and Cheryl Doherty to the IG Committee. The corollary is that some old friends are now leaving the Committee, and so here's a fond 'farewell' and big 'thankyou' to Steve Norval and Alison Burke. I hope that you all have a healthy and fun Summer and look forward to seeing many of you at the Autumn meeting.

Anne Kavanagh - IG Chair.

Editorial

Welcome to this edition of the BCA Industrial Group's Newsletter. Most of the Newsletter contains reports from the XRD and XRF sessions held at this year's BCA Spring Meeting at the University of Loughborough.

As ever, the quality of the report writing is excellent and I'd like to say thank you to all the contributors who have taken the time to put the reports together. 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
http://ig.crystallography.org.uk/ig.htm

The web site has moved to a new server so please update your links to the pages. Thanks goes to our web-master David Taylor for managing this transfer.

Our next event is our Autumn Meeting which will be held at the World of Glass, St.Helens. See page 11 for details. The theme is the Impact of Crystallography in an Industrial Environment. If you work in the Industrial Sector or in a University Department that supports the Industrial sector then please consider giving a presentation. There will be a number of Young Crystallographers present so this is a good opportunity for us to show them real-life applications of our science.

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.

That's it for now. Enjoy your Newsletter.

Mark Farnworth - Pilkington Group Limited, Editor