Medications are substances we often encounter in life. Medicines are used to alleviate and prevent disease. Science is evolving a lot and so there are more and more different medicines on the market. Due to the great interest in them and their composition, I performed an analysis of the composition of sixteen analgesics and antipyretics using the X-ray powder diffraction method. X-ray powder diffraction is a method used to characterize crystalline solids.
We illuminate the sample with X-rays and thus obtain a characteristic diffraction image, which we call a powder pattern or diffractogram. I analyzed the obtained diffractograms with the help of computer programs X'pert HighScore Plus, Crystallographica Search-Match, ConQuest and Mercury and thus identified most of the active ingredients and some of the excipients in the drugs. First, I used X'pert HighScore Plus to compare the diffractograms of drugs with the same active ingredient and found that they were quite similar. This was followed by an analysis of the diffraction peaks with the Crystallographica Search-Match program where I noticed that most of the peaks were explained by the active substance and part of the excipients. Quite a few drugs contained an organic active substance that I could not find in the PDF-2 database of the CSM program, so I used ConQuest programs, the CSD database and Mercury to get a calculated diffractogram, which I then compared with a sample diffractogram. I was unable to identify some of the excipients in the sample, which I consider to be amorphous or present in an insufficient amount in the sample.
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