We run nanospheres in our TEM to verify the machine. The person that trained me is now gone and I feel like I am doing something wrong. I was told to use 14 drops DI water with 2 drops BYK (Disperbyk-192) and 2 drops of the nanosphere size standard. The nanospheres still seem to clump together and or do not show up on the grid at all. Is there a better solution to making this?
Mike Bodnar
I guess you're diluting simply to attempt to get isolated spheres and that there's no microtoming involved (then you'll get a size distribution of discs, not spheres!). There should not be a problem (other than cost) by measuring a row of particles and dividing by the number of particles to get an average diameter and standard deviation. The distortion of adjoining spheres is tiny (there's a NIST publication written by George Mulholland on this topic for their 100 nm standard) and can be disregarded for verification purposes. Many other techniques and materials for verifying TEM.
Mike Bodnar Here's the Mulholland paper on the 100 nm latex. Makes interesting reading.
Maybe you need to use the mixture of solvents not only water. e.g. water+alkohol (ethanol etc.). The vigorous shaking and US-pretreatment are useful for preparation of colloid solution. The solution after US-pretreatment should be weakly grey- (? if black colour of powder) colored. The colloidal solution should be stable for sedimentation. If so, the solvent mixture used correct.
Ekaterina Zolotukhina he does not need a solution, he wants to evaluate the particles
www.researchgate.net/project/nanoparticle-solutions-search-for-a-perpetuum-mobile-there-are-no-particle-solutions-only-particle-dispersions
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