By Ming Zhou
Can you believe we’re already in May? I feel like 2016 is zooming by. If you have been following my posts, the last two months I talked about Raman chemical imaging applications on pharmaceutical products and foreign particulate analysis. This month I want to talk a little bit about scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) applications for pharmaceutical ingredients.
SEM is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to investigate microstructure, surface topography and chemistry of a range of organic and inorganic ingredients. It provides visual information of micrometer and sub-micrometer particles including shape, size, morphology and elemental composition. SEM imaging of raw pharmaceutical ingredients also reveals whether the ingredients are individual particles or aggregates.
SEM imaging can be used for manufacturing process quality control to make sure each batch of excipients or active pharmaceutical ingredients are consistent. In addition, once a pharmaceutical product is formulated, SEM imaging can be used to evaluate how well the ingredients are blended together (or not) in the micro environment.
If you or your clients have a need for pharmaceutical ingredient analysis by SEM, please feel free to give me a call and I will be happy to assist.