Article review – SAXS on mist.

From the proceedings of the 2006 conference on SAXS, held in Kyoto, comes this article entitled “Small-angle X-ray scattering investigation of water droplets in mist” by Y. F. Yano et al..

The article itself is found lacking in many places, on which I’ll touch briefly at the end, but the topic itself is rather unique. They have attempted to recreate mist, fog, using an ultrasonic bath, and have attempted to measure its small-angle X-ray scattering pattern at Spring-8. In terms of the application of the technique to real-life systems everyone understands, you cannot get much closer.

However, I think there is quite some room for improvement on their research. First of all, they took a WAXS set-up to measure a SAXS pattern, which might not be the most ideal set-up in terms of minimising air-scattering. Their method for creating man-made mist might also require some more testing in order to ensure it accurately resembles actual natural mist. Finally, their analysis of their data is quite limited (if not inapplicable). I think they could have done much more with the data they obtained.

Nevertheless, the idea of measuring mist is a nice human interest topic that could, perhaps, be used to get more young people interested in the field.

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