Size Determination of Au Aerosol Nanoparticles by Off-Line TEM/STEM Observations

Determination of particle size distributions of Au aerosol nanoparticles has been performed by a TEM/STEM investigation. The particles are generated by an evaporation/condensation method and are size-selected by differential mobility analyzers (DMA) based on their electrical mobility. Off-line TEM measurements resulted in equivalent projected area diameters assuming that the particles are spherical in shape. In this paper critical factors such as magnification calibration, sampling, image analysis, beam exposure and, particle shape are treated. The study shows that the measures of central tendency; mean, median and mode, are equal as expected from a narrow size distribution. Moreover, the correlation between TEM/STEM and DMA are good, in practice 1:1. Also, STEM has the advantage over TEM due to enhanced contrast and is proposed as an alternative route for determination of particle size distributions of nanoparticles with lower contrast.