The measurement of pore size in porous and microporous materials using resonant ion beam backscattering

Established methods for measuring the size of pores in porous materials include those of mercury porosimetry and gas adsorption. A disadvantage of these methods is that only one determination can be made for each prepared specimen. A property of the ion beam backscattering method is that each specimen can be probed over the surface and also as a function of depth. Furthermore for microporous samples (pore width less than 2 nm) mercury penetration methods cannot be used because the high pressures involved make unreasonable demands in terms of mechanical strength. At the same time gas adsoption techniques are considerably restricted because capillary condensation is no longer possible because of the small size of the pores. A description is given of the methods of calculation of pore size from resonant ion beam backscattering data, with various assumptions for the pore and interpore path length distributions. Examples are shown of results obtained with highly porous silica gels where good agreement with gas adsoption has been achieved. Finally, some results obtained by scanning silica gels of lower porosity are also given. (Auth.)