Particle characterisation
AssigneeMalvern Panalytical Limited
InventorsJason Corbett, Alex Malm
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method of characterising particles in a sample, comprising: obtaining a scattering measurement comprising a time series of measurements of scattered light from a detector, the scattered light produced by the interaction of an illuminating light beam with the sample; producing a corrected scattering measurement, comprising compensating for scattering contributions from contaminants by reducing a scattering intensity in at least some time periods of the scattering measurement; determining a particle characteristic from the corrected scattering measurement.
Claims15
A method of characterising particles in a sample, comprising:
- obtaining a plurality of scattering measurements, each scattering measurement comprising a time series of measurements of scattered light from a detector, the scattered light produced by the interaction of an illuminating light beam with the sample;
- identifying contaminated scattering measurements, in which a contaminant was contributing to the scattered light;
- and
- determining a particle characteristic from scattering measurements that have not been identified as contaminated scattering measurements by:
- determining an autocorrelation function for each scattering measurement that has not been identified as a contaminated scattering measurement;
- combining the autocorrelation functions to produce an average autocorrelation function from which the particle characteristic is derived.
An apparatus for characterising particles, comprising:
- a light source, a sample cell, a detector and a processor;
- wherein
- the light source is operable to illuminate a sample within the sample cell with a light beam so as to produce scattered light by interactions of the light beam with the sample;
- the detector is configured to detect the scattered light and produce a time series of measurements;
- and
- the processor is configured to:
- obtain a scattering measurement comprising a time series of measurements of the scattered light from the detector;
- identify contaminated scattering measurements, in which a contaminant was contributing to the scattered light;
- and
- determine a particle characteristic from scattering measurements that have not been identified as contaminated scattering measurements by:
- determining an autocorrelation function for each scattering measurement that has not been identified as a contaminated scattering measurement;
- combining the autocorrelation functions to produce an average autocorrelation function from which the particle characteristic is derived.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.