In the context of electron microscopy, the term “materials” covers a broad range of substances including metals, rocks, ceramics, polymers, dry biological samples etc. The preparation methods required, if any, may depend on such as:

• Original size/shape
• Examination of external structure or internal microstructure
• Conductivity of sample e.g. conductive coating of non-conductive materials
• Mode of examination e.g. Specimen imaging, Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), EBSD.

Preparation may therefore include techniques such as: sectioning, mounting in conductive resin, grinding, polishing, chemical-etching, jet electro-polishing (for TEM), coating (gold or carbon). Our sample preparation service can offer some, or all, of the preparation methods required to prepare such samples for SEM or TEM.

TEM sample preparation

Materials such as nanoparticles are simply dispersed onto TEM grids using suitable solvents, and air-dried before TEM imaging.

Metals are prepared as thin (

Dear Rathina,

There is a very simple and easy way for preparing any type of samples for TEM/SEM/FESEM etc.

Best Wishes

Dear Safwan al-qawabah , you did not read a question and you have stolen your "answer" from a British web-site with no acknowledgment whatsoever. It's called plagiarism. By the way, the site is

http://www9.open.ac.uk/emsuite/services/sem-and-tem-sample-preparation-materials

Dear Dinesh Babu Rathina , often sample preparation for any analytic technique and particularly for microscopies , depend on the technique itself, the nature of your sample and what you want to analyze on it. Given you have a polymer nanocomposite, probably you would like to see things like the nanomaterials distribution into the polymer matrix, if they are evenly distributed or forming aggregates or clumps inside the polymer. Because your final object was made by injection moulding, may be it could be useful to you to analyze the part´s surface (roughness, defects, ...).

To assess the surface finish of your sample you could rely on SEM and AFM, both techniques would give you a good idea of the surface topography. Each technique will have a range of application, for example, if your´s sample surface roughness is large or its surface patterns are large for the AFM´s range of work you couldn´t use this technique directly (you would need to reduce the sample size or the region of interest you are scanning). To get an idea of the surface characteristics of your sample the best option would be to load it on a SEM, this technique would allow the observation of samples with relatively large roughness or surface patterns, due to its large focusing power. However, SEM requires -generally speaking- a conductive sample to avoid the charge accumulation, which will distort the image, so you would need to coat your sample with a thin conductive layer, usually a metal (gold, platinum, iridium...) or carbon. This layer is usually very thin, normally 5-10 nm. Normally this layer just add a tight skin to your sample, so it doesn´t distort the appearance of your sample topography. When your sample´s topography is on the range of the conductive coat, it could be a problem to observe such tiny patterns, because they could be hidden by the coat, that happened often in my own samples and to observe these samples we can use some trick, in our case we took advance of the charge dissipation tool, in some SEM microscopes it uses water vapour to remove the charge, but in our case we used a cannula that removes the charge by application of flow of N2 gas just over the specimen. Of course the sample must be mounted on a sample holder or stub with conductive tape or some conductive ink or paste.

If you want to see what is inside your sample, still you can get useful information from SEM, TEM and AFM, but this time some sample preparation will be necesary.

The more simple approach would be to break apart one of your samples, specially if your composite is brittle (if not, breaking it apart could be problematic, difficult in one side and in the other it could change the distribution or the appearance of your material). Imagine it is brittle, you break it and now you can observe its inside by SEM, this time the topography is the one from the crak, so that would not be the relevant information, but you can get advantage of the properties of your nanomaterial and how it interacts with the e-beam. Using the right detector you can get a good contrast between the nanoparticles and the matrix, therefore getting some information about the distribution of these nanoparticles in the composite. Remember that this information is just local! That kind of contrast can also be spotted by AFM, the tip can feel the hardness of the materials over which it is scanning, so that you could get information about the distribution of nanoparticles.

Instead of just breaking the sample you could cut it, and polishing it to facilitate the observation of nanoparticles distribution either with SEM, TEM or AFM. For SEM and AFM you only need polishing one side of your specimen, and its thickness didn´t matter too much because , simple speaking, these techniques givie us just surface information. However, for TEM you need a sample that would be transmissive to the e-beam, so it should be very very thin. To obtain a very very thin specimen from your sample you need to polish it at levels that would depend on the sort of materials your sample is made off and that allow the pass of electrons through it, so thickness would depend on material opacity to electrons. If your composite is soft enoug it could be useful to use a microtome to make thin slices. Another option would be to cut a lamella from your sample with the help of a jet of ions on a FIB (Focus Ion Beam) machine.

In TEM you will take advantage of the contrast between your polymer matrix and the nanoparticles, so you could observe their distribution, aggregation, shape, etc.

Some potentially useful answers and links to publications have been alredy provided in this RG forum, others are available as publications elsewhere, please, have a look to them:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_prepare_the_sample_of_polymer_nanocomposite_for_SEM_analysis

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_I_prepare_a_sample_with_flat_surface_for_AFM_atomic_force_microscopy

Article The Use of Atomic Force Microscopy as an Important Technique...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/microscopy-and-microanalysis/article/abs/tem-sample-preparation-of-polymer-based-nanocomposites-using-focused-ion-beam-technique/C3DBF9C539158A4F1AA44AE9633F336A

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.1200-16.pdf

It is always a good idea to talk with the microscopists at your university facility, they will guide you to prepare your samples in the right way for each technique.

Hope this helps you with your research. Good luck.