Articles Archive for January 2011

I hope you all had a fabulous holiday season and that 2011 finds you happy and healthy!  However, I’m also sure that following the festivities a fair number of us are giving more than a passing thought to our size and shape distributions, and if you are following a new fitness regime that it’s still working for you a month into 2011! Now, despite the fact that they say the camera adds ten pounds (or should that be 4.536 kgs?), I am going to recommend that one of the most …

In the previous blog of this series, ‘Why has laser diffraction endured?’ I waxed lyrical about what Leonardo da Vinci may have thought of laser diffraction. Now that I find myself on the brink of a discussion covering the evolution of the technique, at the risk of being twee, I simply cannot resist the temptation to bring in the late, great Charles Darwin!
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles …

Wet dispersion is the most widely used technique to separate sample particles ready for laser diffraction and while it is not overly complicated, it does require some thought.
The unsettling facts…(ha ha)
Unlike colloids, suspensions will eventually settle. If you have ever had to paint a wall you will no doubt have experienced the need to stir a tin of newly opened paint before using it to ensure it can be applied smoothly – for me it is precisely at this point that my initial enthusiasm wears off! Likewise, by the time …

One of the reasons why Malvern Instruments has gained such a reputation for support and expertise throughout both industry and academia is the company’s open provision of such fundamentally solid learning materials. One of these is a paper on the “Basic Principles of Particle Size Analysis”.
As that paper’s author, it has been extremely gratifying to me to learn that it is the most downloaded document on the Malvern website, with over 7500 downloads during the past 3 years, and has no doubt been printed out and shared around many a …

One of my first tasks this year was to put the finishing touches to a new paper which discusses a subject that I’m pretty sure will resonate with many of you in the pharmaceutical industry – the challenge of setting effective product and processing specifications. And I know it can be a challenge – too tight a spec and manufacturing becomes more difficult than it needs to be, too loose and you risk product inconsistencies that affect performance. Setting appropriate specifications is fundamental to Quality by Design (QbD), as described …

In October last year industrial sales and support activities for Malvern and Sysmex Corporation industrial particle characterization systems transferred to Malvern Japan and I would like to take this opportunity to extend my personal gratitude to the whole Sysmex team, for their hard work towards making this exchange of responsibilities run so smoothly. The entire process was a testament to their corporate philosophy to demonstrate both individual competence and unsurpassed teamwork with passion and flexibility.
Words from the President and CEO of Sysmex Corporation
During the transfer ceremony on 1 October, Hisashi …

This, unfortunately, is not simply a philosophical question best suited for consideration with like-minded colleagues in the early hours of the morning. Rather it is a highly practical issue of concern to anyone measuring particle size.
The image above is a Malvern favourite, taken from ‘Basic principles of particle size analysis’, one of our most popular reads.
It highlights two key issues at the heart of particle size measurement. Firstly, if you look at the image in the centre you quickly realise that the size of this particle cannot be properly described …

Happy New Year to you all! Wow! Here comes another new decade and I have been asked to predict what might happen in my world over the next ten years. Am I mad? How long before we forget Sir Alan Sugar’s wonderful prediction, announced during an interview in February 2005, “Next Christmas, the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput.”?  Or Bill Gates announcement to the 2004 World Economic Forum, “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” Both predictions made it into the T3 gadget website’s top ten worst …