Polymers

Polymers encompass a large class of compounds comprising both natural and synthetic materials with a wide variety of properties. Polymeric materials compose a very wide range of materials such as plastics, amber, and rubber, and thus play an essential and ubiquitous role in everyday life. Electron microscopes allow for the better understanding of polymers and assist in the study of structure, morphology and properties.

Now more than ever, with more prominent nanostructuring of polymers, electron microscopy has become an indispensible tool to this research. The LVEM5 is used among other things to better understand the phase behavior and morphology of nanostructured polymers.

These sample types are normally a major challenge to image in an electron microscope due to inherent low contrast provided by their molecular composition. This is not the case when using a LVEM in polymer sciences applications. Issues with sample contrast are eliminated entirely.

Low energy electrons, as found in the LVEM microscopes, interact much more strongly with the sample than high energy electrons of classical TEM. Electrons in the LVEM are strongly scattered by organic materials resulting in exceptional differentiation of features. The density difference required in a sample to give a 5% contrast difference at 5 kV is a mere 0.074 g/cm3.

The LVEM5 electron microscope is the perfect solution for researchers in the structure and properties on polymers and polymeric materials. It operates with four distinct imaging nodes including TEM, SEM, STEM, and ED, and multiple imaging data can be accumulated for any single given sample at the microscale and the nanoscale. This means that information is available in both transmission (ultrastructure) and scanning (surface detail) modes.

The LVEM25 is built upon the same platform as the LVEM5, but operates at a slightly higher accelerating voltage allowing for an improvement to final image resolution. It is also capable of working with thin sectioned polymers prepared in the conventional way (~100nm) making it a true replacement of a conventional full sized TEM.

Whether it is for the greater understanding of self-assembling morphologies or processes of polymer blends and block copolymers, the LVEM electron microscopes are powerful and cost-effective options.