EFFECT OF PARTICLE-SHAPE ON THE PARTICLE-SIZE DISTRIBUTION MEASURED WITH COMMERCIAL EQUIPMENT

The present paper describes the results of a round robin that has been performed to investigate the influence of particle shape on particle- size distributions measured with commercial particle-size analyzers. T he commercial equipment based on the five kinds of measuring principle such as electrical sensing zone, laser diffraction and scattering, X- ray sedimentation, photosedimentation, and light-obscuration methods h ave been employed for analyzing blocky, flaky and rod-like ceramic par ticles. It is demonstrated that the particle shape has a strong influe nce on the particle-size distribution measured by the laser diffractio n and scattering and by photosedimentation. The size range of rod-like particles is particularly wide when these methods are applied. It is also shown that the particle-size distributions of anisotropic samples measured by photosedimentation has a tendency to be remarkably scatte red in the coarse-size range. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All right s reserved.