Understanding Particulate Contaminants via Automated Electron Beam Analysis

Particulate contaminants are an important concern in today's precision automotive assemblies. Whether driven by quality, cost, or performance considerations understanding the source and impact of particles requires detailed knowledge of their distribution in size and composition. Particle-by-particle measurement of filtered material is today conducted automatically by computer-operated microscope systems. When an optimized electron beam analysis tool performs such automated microscopic examination it provides not only distributions of particulate material by size and shape, but also accurate classification by composition. Detailed images of individual particles are also readily obtained and can be a great aid to source evaluation.