Autumn re-runs: A microscopic view of some counter materials
This was one of my favorite posts last year. It ran on 21 December 2009 . As proud of it as I was at the time, it's a work of scholarship for crying out loud, I ran it last year during Christmas week and no one saw it. Now I ask you, what other design blog partners with a scanning electron microscope manufacturer to test a marketing claim? Who?
Me, it really is who.
Dartmouth College
Another great contact I've made through Twitter in the last few months is the Aspex Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. Aspex has been in business since the early '90s and they have embraced social media with a savvy and confidence that makes them stand out. The Aspex Corporation makes Scanning Electron Microscopes among other things and that a company in a very technical field and a kitchen designer could strike up a casual acquaintance is a great example of the expansion and simultaneous contraction of the world made possible by social media.
A scanning electron microscope (or SEM) is an instrument for visualizing the surfaces of objects and materials not possible through ordinary optical microscopes. Rather than using a lens to magnify reflected light (an optical microscope) SEMs use a focused beam of electrons to scan a surface.
Aspex Corporation
The electrons bounce back to a detector and the detector generates an photo. SEMs can handiest "see" a small segment of an item at a time. So the item being examined is positioned on a Sample Stage inside the SEM and the stage makes small, incremental actions referred to as rasters. The rasters are then compiled right into a complete image and displayed on a display screen. It's quite cool stuff. Most human beings have seen SEM snap shots of ant's heads or snowflakes and that's a brief clarification of ways those snap shots have been made.
Well Aspex is jogging a proposal to scan and examine any pattern that may in shape in the chamber of one in every of their SEMs free of charge so I took them up on their provide.
I revel in reducing via advertising communicate to an nearly dangerous degree and counter substances are a product class rife with it. For as long as they have got been around, I've heard the claims made by way of quartz composite manufacturers that their products have been "flawlessly clean and non-porous." Since this claim is always made throughout a comparison with the floor irregularities of granite my BS meter is going off.
Quartz composites are a superbly first-class fabric and I specify their use all the time. In my thoughts, they're an opportunity to herbal stone counters however not a substitute for them. They have a completely precise look and there are particular times whilst their use is referred to as for. At the identical time, every now and then the over all look of a room calls for granite or soapstone or marble. These substances aren't interchangeable and each one has its strengths and weaknesses.
So when Aspex Corporation made its offer to scan any sample I could fit into the chamber of one of their SEMs, I decided to put to the test the quartz composite claims of perfect smoothness and non porosity.
I took samples that were sitting on the end of my desk for years and shipped them off to Aspex.
The samples I sent have been a piece of Santa Cecelia granite and Sienna Ridge via Silestone. This is by no means an correct sampling of a whole industry's products. Rather, this is a check of very precise and thoroughly treated samples. The proof offered here is anecdotal at fine but I still there is some thing legitimate to be discovered.
Image from Aspex Corp.
Here are my samples upon arrival at Aspex.
photo from Aspex C orp.
Here they're enjoyable in front of the PSEM eXpress, Aspex Corporation's bench top version.
The degree of magnification in the following examples is expressed with a scale in each image. The scale is in microns and a micron is another word for a micrometer. A micro meter is a millionth of a meter, put another way, a micron is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microns are abbreviated as µm. To give you a little more perspective, a human air is 100µm wide and a red blood cell is 8µm in diameter. Salmonella bacteria are 2µm in length and 0.5µm wide.
So right here's what my pattern of Santa Cecilia looks like.
In this picture, the scale at the pinnacle reads 2 hundred?M. So if you took human hairs and set them facet by means of facet, they could be as extensive as the size.
In this picture the dimensions reads one thousand?M. So if you took ten human hairs and set they side by means of facet, they might be as wide as the scale.
Here's some other Santa Cecilia granite photo at one thousand?M.
Now it's quartz composite's turn.
Here's my quartz composite sample with a scale that reads 2 hundred?M.
Here is is at a better magnification, a thousand?M
And any other shot of it at 1000?M.
Pretty cool, huh? Now, I will grant the quartz composite people an acknowledgement that this sample is smoother than this sample of granite, but I would hardly call it "perfectly smooth and non porous."
So what I take away from this is that I won't be swayed by claims that I should specify quartz composites over natural stone because they are smoother and non-porous (and more hygienic by implication) and I will continue to use composites where they would look best and natural stone where it would look best.
What do you observed?
In the meantime, poke around on Aspex Corp's website . You can even send in something of your own with this form . They have a pretty cool contest every week where they invite people to guess what a scan is. Here's last week's:
Care to threat a wager?
Why it's a Post-it observe being pulled lower back from the pad of course.
Thanks Aspex!