Chemical Imaging for Composition of Inhomogeneous Materials
Composition of inhomogeneous materials, by chemical imaging.
Intertek expertise in chemical imaging is be applied to pharmaceutical composition, packaging materials, personal care products and other samples. While conventional optical and electron microscopy methods provide a picture of the physical structure of a material, chemical imaging can produce a picture where every point of the image has an associated data set (such as an infrared spectrum), which can be interrogated to display the variation in chemical structure across a surface or within a material.
Chemical imaging methods are for the study and visualization of inhomogeneous structures, with applications in many fields, including:
- Pharmaceuticals: imaging of polymorphic components or distributions of active ingredients in a formulation or tablet
- Packaging: imaging of surface contamination resulting in coating failure or sealing problems
- Semiconductors: visualization of surface chemistry in finely patterned substrates
- Personal care products: displaying the distribution of an active ingredient on substrates such as human hair or clothing fibres
Techniques used to generate chemical images:
- SSIMS Static Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry
- X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)
- Infrared spectroscopy
- Raman spectroscopy
- SEM with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis (EDX)
- Confocal Scanning microscopy
Contact us to see how Intertek can help your organization with Chemical Imaging for Composition of Inhomogeneous Materials.