Iron Oxide Nanocubes as a New Certified Reference Material for Nanoparticle Size Measurements.

The rational design and increasing industrial use of nanomaterials require a reliable characterization of their physicochemical key properties like size, size distribution, shape, and surface chemistry. This calls for nanoscale reference materials (nanoRMs) for the validation and standardization of commonly used characterization methods closely matching real-world nonspherical nano-objects. This encouraged us to develop a nonspherical nanoRM of very small size consisting of 8 nm iron oxide nanocubes (BAM-N012) to complement spherical gold, silica, and polymer nanoRMs.

Counting Small Particles in Electron Microscopy Images-Proposal for Rules and Their Application in Practice.

Electron microscopy (EM) is the gold standard for the characterisation of the morphology (size and shape) of nanoparticles. Visual observation of objects under examination is always a necessary first step in the characterisation process. Several questions arise when undertaking to identify and count particles to measure their size and shape distribution.

Trends in selected fields of reference material production.

For more than 110 years, BAM has been producing reference materials for a wide range of application fields. With the development of new analytical methods and new applications as well as continuously emerging more stringent requirements of laboratory accreditation with regard to quality control and metrological traceability, the demand and requirements for reference materials are increasing. This trend article gives an overview of general developments in the field of reference materials as well as developments in selected fields of application in which BAM is active.

XRF-analysis of fine and ultrafine particles emitted from laser printing devices.

In this work, the elemental composition of fine and ultrafine particles emitted by ten different laser printing devices (LPD) is examined. The particle number concentration time series was measured as well as the particle size distributions. In parallel, emitted particles were size-selectively sampled with a cascade impactor and subsequently analyzed by the means of XRF.

Elastic light scattering from free sub-micron particles in the soft X-ray regime.

We report the first experimental results on angle-resolved elastic light scattering in the soft X-ray regime, where free sub-micron particles in the size regime between 150 and 250 nm are studied in the gas phase by using a continuous particle beam. Two different types of studies are reported: (i) Angle-resolved elastic light scattering experiments provide specific information on the scattering patterns in the regime of element-selective inner-shell excitation near the Si 2p-edge (80-150 eV). In addition to intense forward scattering, we observe distinct features in the angle-resolved scattering patterns.