Light Microscopy

Microscopy analysis is essential to gain an understanding of the microstructure or nanostructure of materials, chemicals or products. Data from microscopy analysis is important to progressing your research and product development programmes, conducting failure analysis where your product or material has failed or resolving contamination issues in manufacturing or other parts of the supply chain. Effective digital microscopy analysis requires precise preparation equipment, advanced microscopy instrumentation, specialist cameras and image analysis software. The results and images captured must be assessed by qualified and experienced microscopy experts to gain the valuable insight that you will need to solve problems or extend understanding of your materials. The shape and size of a particle can be very important in industry. Particle shape and size can have an effect on how particles are processed, how the finished product looks and behaves, and can even result in product failure. For these reasons it is important to know the shape of your particles and control their size. Light Microscopy is an absolute measurement of particle size and shape, and can be used to look at each particle individually. The Light Microscope, also known as the Optical Microscope (OM), is the oldest design of a microscope. It uses light within the visible spectrum and a system of lenses in order to magnify small samples. Particles can be seen down to micrometer size. Many other particle sizing techniques operate on the assumption that every particle is spherical and reports a value of equivalent diameter. The light microscope can show the exact shape and size of each particle. When coupled with a camera the light microscope can take photographs of the particles. It can also be coupled with a computer with image analysis software to determine both shape and size. Polarized light microscopy is an extremely important and powerful tool in particle identification and characterization, and should be employed by any laboratory involved in addressing product contamination or product failure investigations. In combination with other analytical chemical microscopy techniques, it can lead to solving complex problems that otherwise go unrealized. A analytical chemical microscopy group has several analysts with extensive expertise and experience in unknown particle identification from a diverse industrial chemistry and forensic science background.