Vector similarity measure for particle size analysis based on forward light scattering

Abstract

The set of linear equations in the inversion of the particle size distribution (PSD) based on light diffraction is an ill-posed problem. To solve this problem, a technique based on the similarity measure between the measured vector and the column vectors of the matrix is studied and is tested by numerical simulations and experiments. An iterative method based on the vector similarity measurement (VSM) is proposed to predict the peaks of the PSD in steps. Simulations of the mono/bi-modal particle systems are discussed. It is found that the VSM technique can predict the PSD with low sensitivity to the experimental errors.