JRC Communiqué

Presently, nanomaterials are applied in a variety of products. To provide a common understanding of the term “nanomaterial”, the European Commission adopted a Recommendation (2011/696/EU) on the definition of nanomaterial in 2011. A threshold, based on particle size and particle fraction, forms the core of this definition.

Over the last decade, the JRC has produced a set of four CRMs for quality control of nanoparticle size analysis methods. These CRMs, which consist of suspensions of near-spherical silica nanoparticles of different sizes, have become important metrology tools during the development and validation of nanoparticle size analysis methods, and they are a benchmark for ensuring the comparability of particle size results worldwide.

In practice, nanoparticles do not always have a regular (e.g. spherical) shape. Instead, they often have either irregular shapes or peculiar shapes tailored to a particular application or function. The size of simple regularly shaped particles can be readily defined by measuring the length of the particles. On the other hand, the size of non-spherical particles, such as rods, is less defined because each different external dimension yields a different size result.

In supporting the measurement community with metrology tools that enable the further development of methods for …