Particle Size Distribution by Combined Elastic Light Scattering and Turbidity Measurements. A Novel Method to Estimate the Required Normalization Factor

Turbidity (T) and Elastic Light Scattering (ELS) measurements can be combined to estimate the particle size distribution (PSD) of a polymer latex. To this effect a “normalization factor” must be employed to adequately scale both measurements. In a real application, such factor is a priori unknown, and it must be estimated for determining the PSD. In a previous publication, a method was proposed to simultaneously estimate the normalization factor and the PSD by solving an inverse nonlinear problem. In this work, a simpler technique is presented which estimates the normalization factor and the PSD by sequentially solving two inverse linear problems. To evaluate the proposed technique, a synthetic example based on a polystyrene latex sample with a bimodal PSD was solved. It is shown that, for slight noise measurements, the errors in the estimation of the normalization factor are quite small and have a low effect on the PSD recovery.