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40 Years of Presentation Particle Size Distributions–Yet Still Incorrect?
Author(s) -
Sommer Karl
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
particle and particle systems characterization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.877
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1521-4117
pISSN - 0934-0866
DOI - 10.1002/1521-4117(200102)18:1<22::aid-ppsc22>3.0.co;2-2
Subject(s) - distribution (mathematics) , statistical physics , representation (politics) , logarithm , particle size distribution , particle (ecology) , interpretation (philosophy) , statistics , particle density , quality (philosophy) , particle size , biological system , mathematics , computational physics , physics , chemistry , computer science , thermodynamics , mathematical analysis , quantum mechanics , geology , oceanography , volume (thermodynamics) , politics , political science , biology , law , programming language
While the quality and variety of particle size measuring instruments have improved dramatically in recent years, both in their accuracy and in their speed of measurement, the representation of the measured data – particularly the density distribution – has generally received little attention from the manufacturers. The depiction of a continuous density distribution by a percentage value on the ordinate makes no sense. Although logarithmic density distributions serve a purpose with distinctly separated bi‐ or multimodal distributions (by analogy with analytical chemical spectra), they can lead to serious interpretation errors in the case of the monomodal distribution. Thus for monomodal distributions either the density distribution q r (x) should be used or no representation of the density distribution attempted.