For yet another year, Amable Bernabé, of the Soft Materials Service at ICMAB, offered this course. The course was an explanation of different techniques to characterize nanoparticles and particulate matter, including the fundamentals of these techniques, sample preparation, practical examples and results interpretation. 

The course is offered every year through the CSIC training courses offered every year for all its staff. 

Amable Bernabé showing the materials' characterization equipment to the course participants

Soft Materials Service

The Soft Materials Service provides equipment and technical assistance for the preparation and characterization of micro-and nanostructured soft molecular materials (molecular surfaces, micro- and nanoparticulate molecular materials, plastic films, dispersed systems, SAMs, etc..) with interest in different areas of application (biomedicine, electronics, energy storage and other chemical and material application areas).

The Soft Materials Service, with Amable Bernabé and David Piña as technicians, participate in many European projects and give service to the whole ICMAB community, apart from the Nanomol Research Unit, and also to other CSIC centers and research institutions and companies. I

On April 2022, the Service Materials Service, which is part of Unit6 of the ICTS Nanbiosis and CIBER-BBN, obtained the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Certification, which ensures the quality of the service provided and helps to continue with its improvement and extension to future services.

Contents of the course

Theory:

• Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) with Zetasizer Nano ZS (Malvern Instruments)
  • Size distribution
  • Z Potential 
• Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) with Nanosight NS300 (Malvern Instruments)
  • Size distribution
  • Particle concentration
  • Fluorescence
• Light Scattering (LS) with Mastersizer 2000 (Malvern Instruments)
  • Size distribution

Practice:

• Sample analysis and practical cases of Dynamic Light Scattering with the Zetasizer Nano ZS (Malvern Instruments) equipment.
• Samples analysis and practical cases of the Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) technique with the Nanosight NS300 (Malvern Instruments) equipment.
• Sample analysis and practical cases of the Light Scattering (LS) technique with the Mastersizer 2000 (Malvern Instruments) instrument.