Breakthrough in Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA)

Nanoparticle uses are widespread through many industries. However, there is an unmet need for a routine, automated, and user-friendly method that reproducibly provides accurate quantitative measurements of concentration and size distribution for a wide diversity of nanoparticles. These needs are particularly acute for samples of mixed nanoparticle sizes. Furthermore, the ability to measure nanoparticle kinetic processes such as dissolution, swelling, crystallization and aggregation, is increasingly important in various fields of R&D and QC. Those capabilities were previously unavailable because the detection systems of light scatting-based instruments are over-whelmed by the very large dynamic range of scattered light intensity produced by differently-sized nanoparticles co-existing in a polydisperse sample.

In the presentation we describe a novel, Multispectral Advanced Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (MANTA) system for particle visualization and routine determination of particle concentrations and their sizes. These capabilities combined in one instrument, enable first-of-their-kind measurements of particle kinetic processes which will also be demonstrated. MANTA’s system is based on the analysis of individual nanoparticles undergoing Brownian motion in a liquid medium whereby the nanoparticle movements are tracked by recording images of scattered light from each particle. Since the measurements are made on an individual, particle-by-particle basis, the ViewSizer 3000 offers significant advantages over methods that measure an ensemble of particles. In particular, accurate and reproducible particle size distributions (PSDs) are provided and those PSDs are accompanied by video recordings of all particles in the sample.