Characterization of Nanostructured Materials

Many nanostructured materials have been and are being prepared with increasing control over molecular configurations, conformations, and supramolecular assembly. These nanomaterials place an increasing challenge for characterization techniques to confirm the proposed structure and morphology. Several techniques are widely available, with increasing degrees of sophistication. Ideal techniques are those where the natural scale of the technique, such as radiation wavelength, matches that of the size scale of features in the material. In the case of nanostructured polymer blends the features are dispersed polymer phases, filler particles, and interphases. Immediately electron microscopies and X-ray techniques are apparent. Adaptions of these and related techniques extend their capabilities for the nano range. In addition to experimental observations, methods for quantifying the images or data are needed for comparison between materials and modeling via theoretical equations, which in the limit may become molecular modeling. As needs arise instruments have been improved in detection, resolution, accuracy, and precision. Development of any nanomaterial requires support from a suite of increasingly capable instrumentation. This review concentrates on techniques that directly probe nanostructures with mention of related techniques that apply to any dimension scale, though provide important secondary data.