Question

You work for a defense company in their characterization department. Your superior brings you 0.5 g of some reddish powder that was scraped off of some unknown object. She wants you to determine what the material is but cannot give you any information about where it comes from because of the top secret nature of the object. Describe 3 things that you would like to know about the material. What techniques would you use to find these three things? Why?

Answer 1

Solution:

Firstly, I want to know the elements which are present in the powder then only I can do the further characterization of that powder. so that to find the elements, I need to do Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDS or EDX) analysis in Scanning Electron Microscope(SEM). By EDX analysis we can investigate the sample like we can find the elements that are present in it and we can do the chemical characterization of the sample through EDX. By characterizing the sample in SEM we can also find the Topography, Morphology (size and shape of the powder particles).

Secondly, I want to find the amount of each element that is present in the powder(chemical composition) . By EDX analysis we can find the elements but to find the amount of each element of powder we need to X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy(XPS). By XPS analysis we can find the chemical composition and surface analysis of powder.

At last, the most important and basic fundamentals of characterization technique i.e X-Ray Diffraction(XRD), for XRD analysis the sample must be known that's why first we have done EDX analysis after that XRD can be done. By XRD analysis we can find the crystal structure of powder. so that we can do the alloying additon with that powder. The other parameter also we can find through XRD are lattice parameter, particle size, phase analysis, etc..

These are three important things I need to find out from the given powder. By doing these characterizing techniques, we can find these three things so that we can use that powder in further applications.