Sizing multimodal suspensions with differential dynamic microscopy

Abstract

Differential dynamic microscopy (DDM) can be used to extract the mean particle size from videos of suspensions. However, many suspensions have multimodal particle size distributions, for which a single ‘mean’ is not a sufficient description. After clarifying how different particle sizes contribute to the signal in DDM, we show that standard DDM analysis can extract the mean sizes of two populations in a bimodal suspension given prior knowledge of the sample's bimodality. Further, the use of the CONTIN algorithm obviates the need for such prior knowledge. Finally, we show that by selectively analysing portions of the DDM images, we can size a trimodal suspension where the large particles would otherwise dominate the signal, again without prior knowledge of the trimodality.