It depends what material you are looking at, if the material is metallic or plasmonic material, you can use plasmon optical properties. if they are non-metalic material and composite, may be their molecular vibronic, roratonic, ...Raman/IIR properties might help .

Hi

Shivani Sharma

Mani Teja Bodduluri can you send the XRD report what you get. Try to match with JCDPS files it may gives some useful information what you asked.

Gebreselema Hk Thank you for the suggestion. The powder material I would like to characterize is NdFeB.

V R Arun Prakash The data from XRD is full of noise.

Dear Shivani

I do agree what you say. I am convince with your answer. True in EDAX we can measure the Composition that's fine. Different area will give different composition. My doubt is

Is phase and composition same ? If a phase is having reacted mixture of two atoms, the EDAX will tell the presence of each atom it never say about the etuteic mixture. Phasees may be in any form (etuteic, ternary, binary like that). Different phases creates different crystal structure that's y I am thinking about.

Anyway it's a great discussion with you....best

Dr. Arun

I think there is many techniques if you are dealing with ternary alloys. One way could be using analytic chemistry techniques and the second I am thinking might be perhaps using Electron diffraction spectroscopy using electron microscope which I believe is what Shivani Sharma is saying.

Electron diffraction can help you, if you have electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), it may help you solving the chemical environment of the elements from your sample as well..

Mani Teja Bodduluri

First of all, I am not able to understand why a material will behaviours amorphous in XRD and nanocrystal in TEM. Please reconfirm your results, if they are nanocrystal in TEM then they should be nanocrystal in XRD too. Otherwise, the other possibility is the existence of a very minor percentage of the nanocrystalline phase with bulk percentage as an amorphous.

About your question, I would prefer to go for surface imaging with backscattered electrons using a Scanning Electron Microscope. These Backscattered electron micrographs will provide you with images composition data related to element and compound detection over a very large area irrespective of amorphous or crystalline nature of the material. The chemical compositions of the phases evident in the backscattered electron micrographs can be determined by EDX probe of SEM and other techniques, as has been already mentioned by others ( Shivani Sharma

Dear Mani,

Particle size has a direct influence on material properties such as Particle size measurement is routinely carried out across a wide range of industries and is often a critical parameter in the manufacture of many products. Particle size has a direct influence on material properties such as, stability in suspension, efficacy of delivery, texture and feel, viscosity, packing density and porosity etc.

Particles are 3-dimensional objects, and unless they are perfect spheres (e.g. emulsions or bubbles), they cannot be fully described by a single dimension such as a radius or diameter. In order to simplify the measurement process, it is often convenient to define the particle size using the concept of equivalent spheres. In this case the particle size is defined by the diameter of an equivalent sphere having the same property as the actual particle such as volume or mass.

There is a wide range of commercially available particle characterization techniques that can be used to measure particulate samples. Each has its relative strengths and limitations and there is no universally applicable technique for all samples and all situations.

Static light scattering techniques such as laser diffraction will give a volume weighted distribution, Dynamic light scattering techniques will give an intensity weighted distribution, where the contribution of each particle in the distribution relates to the intensity of light scattered by the particle is quite common. Other techniques are such as electrophoeretic scattering, automated imaging, sedimentation, sieving etc., In order to simplify the interpretation of particle size distribution data, a range of statistical parameters can be calculated. TEM can be best instrument to define the automated imaging particle/precipitate (eta, eta prime, intermetallic compounds) size.

Hope this is helpful for you.

Ashish

Have you tried the selected area electron diffraction method? If not try it? And there is possibility in chemical methods of preparing powder samples that a portion of your powder sample might be amorphous. You also try to analyze (XRD) different portions of your sample separately part by part.

Best and simple way is to go for the chemical analysis (XPS), it will help you find the chemical environment.

Good reply

Hi M Burhanuz Zaman, thank you for the suggestion. Currently, with the help of my colleague we are trying to find different phases employing selective area diffraction method as you suggested, but the results are not so promising.

Where you are getti ng problems Mani Teja Bodduluri

You may use EDS and EBSD detector of Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) which has high resolution specification in order to observe grain structure and grain boundary appropriately instead of TEM. In Addition, If you scan to micro structure with EBSD detector slowly, You will be able to acquire better outcomes. I recommend that you should use OXFORD EBSD or EDAX EBSD detectors. Both of them will be perform best analysis.