DETERMINATION OF REACTION KINETICS USING ONLINE X-RAY DIFFRACTION

X-ray diffraction (XRD) is a powerful technique for the study of polymorphism and polymorphic phase transformations. Monitoring of phase transformation directly has been very limited to-date. The XRD system used in this study was used to determine the rate of transformation of pure glutamic acid form to form in a solution mediated phase. On every run starting from the pure form, the transformation process was monitored continuously at fixed temperature, and separate experiments were performed as a function of temperature. The operating temperature was varied from 36 to 57 C with 10% w/w solid concentration. Data were taken every 200 seconds until the transformation was completed. This paper is concerned with a study of the transformation of the alpha () form of L-glutamic acid (L-GA) to the beta () form in order to determine the kinetic reaction. The rate constant (k), activation energy (Ea) and pre-exponential factor (A) were obtained. Sensitivity tests were also carried out to examine minimum detection limit when both and present in the mixture. In addition, effect of particle size on XRD patterns was also determined. The results show that XRD gives useful information to observe polymorphism for pharmaceutical industry.