SAMPLE PREPARATION FOR ATOMIC FORCE MICROS-COPY AND INFRARED MICROSCOPY

ADVANCEMENT AND CHALLENGES FOR WOOD-BASED MATERIALS

 

Wood composites and laminates play an important role in today's furniture industry, especially when used in high-quality kitchen and dining room furniture. These areas of application put high demands on the surface quality of the materials used. Therefore, high quality standards are already required at the beginning of the value chain. This is accompanied by the interest in enabling the most efficient and meaningful sample characterisation possible, down to the micro- and nanometre scale.

 

Current sample preparation methods are mostly simple and rely on cutting and grinding the materials to be tested. However, a major limitation for microscopic investigations is, that the current methods result in smeared coatings on the sample cross-sections and high surface roughness. Therefore, they are not suitable for sample preparation in measuring AFM (atomic force microscopy) and IR microscopy. In the presented project, new preparation methods had been developed and implemented using various wood-based material samples. Based on the significantly improved sample preparation, a clear chemical and physical characterisation of the wood-based materials is possible over the entire sample cross-section or multi-layer structure.

 

Effects and impacts

The new sample preparation method (improved embedding and new technique for grinding and polishing) enables the characterisation of cross-section samples of difficult to examine wood-based materials. The knowledge of the exact layer structure makes it possible to draw conclusions about the final surface properties and thus to make adaptations for their optimisation in the manufacturing process at an early stage. This enables a quick reaction in production and avoids unnecessary rejects.


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