I am preparing the sol-gel thin films. I cannot measure the particle size of The films by FE-SEM because of the agglomeration. I want to use TEM to measure particle size of the films.
You can purchase the TEM grids and directly prepare your films on grids. However, for measurement of particle size you will need HRTEM.
Dear Volker thank you for your suggestion, but my films were deposited on quartz substrate.
you can also tink about using diffraction if you want to measure the domain size (non destructively). In some cases (most that I know), the domains and the grains composing the films are roughly the same object
Dear Matteo, could you provide me with the method that you mentioned, because I do not have idea about measuring the domain size using diffraction.
@Volker: I better not see that equation ;) at least not for a general/quantitative use... too many threads on that in here
@Ftema: there are several possibilities, but it all depends on your film, on the thickness, on the roughness. So I give you just a couple hints (as I said, the possibilities are several).
Let's assume that all domains are incoherently scattering one with respect to the other (usually very reasonable if the size is large enough). In this case, if the film is columnar, then at least for the size normal to the film (i.e. the thickness of the film) you can magically use even Scherrer formula. This is usually not the case of a sol-gel film. If the film is not columnar, you can usually treat it as a powder (polycrystalline aggregate) and e.g. the WPPM method might work.
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