Optical microscopy characteristics

The various studies of shock-modified powders provide clear indications of the principal characteristics of shock modification. The picture is one in which the powders have been extensively plastically deformed and defect levels are extraordinarily large. The extreme nature of the plastic deformation in these brittle materials is clearly evident in the optical microscopy of spherical alumina [85B01]. In these defect states their solid state reactivities would be expected to achieve values as large as possible in their particular morphologies greatly enhanced solid state reactivity is to be expected. 

This is a serious misnomer as these inert constituents of pitch are certainly not inert during the carbonization processes. It is well-established that the size of the optical texture of a coke can be reduced by the presence within the pitch of primary QI material (102-105). The QI material within the pitch becomes adsorbed on the surfaces of the growth units of mesophase. This thereby prohibits coalescence of these growth units into the larger sized optical textures. When this process is viewed by hot-stage optical microscopy (106) this lack of coalescence is seen to reduce markedly the flow characteristics of the mesophase - it becomes almost static. 

Side by aide with good visial qualitative observation of HIPS morphology obtained by means of above described method we applied the method used in me-teillography (14) and adapted for polymer material for optical microscopy (15) for getting distribution characteristics of rubber phase in the material and quantitative value of microstructure elements in electron microscope pictvires. 

Impactor Characteristics. The impactor characteristics can be calculated if the densities of the particles are known. However, since this study was only for the size-fractionation of particles, the distribution was measured by optical microscopy. Ambient air was sampled for 1 hr and the particles were collected on glass slides. The particles were matched to the size circle on the calibrated Porton graticule. Approximately 100 particles were counted on each stage and the size distributions were generated. 

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