Dispersion of Particles on Flat Substrates for Microprobe Analysis

This contribution proposes a shockwave dispersion method for sample preparation in safeguards analytical practice. It compares this method to conventional sampling techniques of environmental swipes and uses a range of statistical methods to evaluate the dispersion quality of seven procedures. A major part of this paper involves image analysis of optical and scanning electron microscope (SEM) images using Fiji software and plugins, as well as the handling of large data sets that are typical of modern imaging systems. Images were acquired by a Zeiss Z2m optical microscope and a Tescan Lyra3 SEM.