Anomalous behaviour…?
Hello once again from the Malvern development labs!
You may remember I wrote a blog last year about the Dispersion Index parameter on the Hydro Sight and how it can be used to supplement Mastersizer information on the dispersion state of your sample. Well, in this blog I’m going to introduce you to another novel feature of the Hydro Sight: automatic anomaly detection. (There’s also a little game at the end that you can all play at home – and prizes are at stake….)
This feature is very useful for troubleshooting problems with your laser diffraction dispersion method or measurements. Maybe you think your sample’s not dispersing properly or perhaps you think you might have some pesky contaminants in your sample…but you’re not sure. If only you could SEE the little blighters and prove it… Well, help might be at hand.
The anomaly detection feature automatically captures and saves out image frames considered anomalous, providing you with evidence of the rogue species and the means to potentially identify them.
Referring back to those 256 shades of grey, a frame is classed as “anomalous” if the variation in its greyscale intensity falls outside a specified range. You can define the specified range by selecting one of the sensitivity settings: low, medium or high (where high will identify more anomalous frames the low setting for any given frame sequence*)
*consider this a hint for the little puzzle below….
This feature has proved really quite exciting to use in our development studies – imagine our surprise that when attempting to disperse agglomerates with ultrasound the anomaly detector picked out these:
The agglomerates were in actual fact needle-like particles that had formed in the suspension!
It is also the kind of tool you can have a bit of fun with…
I’ve put together a video of 20 micron latex with a bit of a difference, but in order to play the game you will first need to download the Hydro Sight demo software (trust me, this is worth it – did I mention that there are PRIZES….?):
This is the video you will need: https://malvern.sharefile.com/d-s5b79a196bdf4100b
And you will need to save it in this location:
C:\Users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos
Then open the software and select the Customer Sample video to run:
The challenge is to identify the two phrases in the video clip (hint: one might be an anagram…)
Once you think you know the answers, send them to me me at cathryn.langley@malvern.com and you could win a much sought-after prize…
Good luck!