Abstract
Spherical polymer particles in five different size ranges from ∼2 to 200 µm were measured by optical microscopy/image analysis of polished cross sections. From the two-dimensional (2-D) section-size distributions, two stereological techniques were employed to determine the three-dimensional (3-D) particle-size distributions: the classical Schwartz-Saltykov (SS) method, further developed by Takahashi and Suito, and the technique of Harayama, which was applied by Basak and Sengupta (HBS). The objectives of this study were to assess the viability of image analysis and the SS or HBS techniques as quantitative particle analysis methods and to compare them to laser diffraction (LD) of loose powders. It was found that the image analysis/stereology (IA/S) and LD results agreed within about 15 pct over most of the size range studied. Moreover, the IA/S technique accurately estimates experimental particle-size distributions with nonsymmetric or multimodal characteristics. Stereological parameters were studied, such as the number of size classes (histogram step intervals), and methods of displaying the size distributions were compared to develop best practices. The effect of oversight of small particles, which is an area of concern with stereological techniques, was also investigated in terms of changes to the mean and standard deviations of the 3-D particle-size distributions.
Published Version
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