Di-p-bromophenyl ether, a redetermined crystal structure derived from low-quality diffraction data

We show that the lack of good quality data, normally essential to successful crystal structure analysis, can in part be compensated for by measuring data from several crystals and merging the resulting data sets. The crystal structure of the flame retardant di-p-bromophenyl ether, C12H8Br2O, a twofold axially symmetric molecule, has been redetermined and refined from such a merged multi-crystal diffraction data set to an acceptable conventional R factor (R1 = 0.06), a result which could not have been obtained from any one of our single-crystal diffraction data sets used alone in the normal manner.