Chapter 10 - Chemical Imaging as an Analytical Methodology

Abstract

Abtract In the previous chapters we demonstrated that, over the last 50 years, different analytical methods were developed and refined to link the composition and structure of man-made and natural materials at the nano/microscale to their functional behaviour at the macroscopic scale. These developments came at the price of increasingly complex analytical equipment and procedures of analysis. They also gave rise to a vast increase of information on each element of a 2-D or a 3-D data array resulting from systematic 2-D or 3-D local measurements. In these arrays, each individual element thus becomes a complex integrated set of morphological, structural and compositional information. With imaging analysis and other analytical methodologies that produce massive amounts of data, analytical chemistry is increasingly transformed from a hypothesis-driven targeted methodology into a discovery-driven, shotgun methodology. In the nontargeted approach, one must decide what needs to be measured, the method should be selected and validated and the analysis performed. In a nontargeted approach everything feasible is determined and information is extracted from the collected data. In such conditions, the central concept of analytical chemistry and its relation to standard metrological concepts (uncertainty, validation and/or traceability to fundamental standards, etc.) seem to lose their central guiding role.