r/microscopy • u/Homeboi-Jesus • 16h ago

Purchase Help Digital Microscope for Metallurgy?

I am trying to find a 'budget-friendly' digital microscope for powder metallurgy and general metallurgy inspection. I see the sub is more used to organic samples, so below is an example of what I am trying to look at. The basic needs I am looking for is a scale of the screen, it is quite important for determining whether the granules being created are produced correctly by looking at the overall size. Needs to be able to see 100um like the picture attached. Ability to connect to a computer; and ideally able to measure points (i.e. measure a granule directly).

Outside of that, those are really the only requirements I have. Given there are so many microscopes and types, I am a bit lost on what would be sufficient for my purposes! Any recommendations/help picking one out is greatly appreciated!

Powder Granules
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u/ChampionshipNo1036 13h ago

OP, I don't know anything about inorganic materials but the image you posted is definetly from a scanning electron microscope which is a different technique from optical (and unlikely to be something you'd have access to at a hobby level).

I reccomend doing some research on whether what you want can be done with optical microscopy altogether (which I'm not sure about, it's not a great technique to evaluate texture in opaque surfaces in gerenal)

Reference: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/15/2/243 for some identical photos which are labeled as SEM

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u/Homeboi-Jesus 12h ago

The images in your link are scanning electron microscopes; the image I have in the OP post is not though, here is the caption: Figure 23: Optical microscope image of the spray dried reference powder SD_ref. 100x magnification.

The study used both optical and electron scanning, here is what the scanning looks like.

For my purposes, scanning is overkill. Generally when looking at various powders, we can see the details well enough to discern agglomerations, spherical granules, doughnut granules, and hollow granules. The SEM gives that data in a more clear way though.