The measurement system of nanoparticle size distribution from dynamic light scattering data

•The system uses high speed photon counter instead of the traditional correlator to reduce the cost of the measurement system greatly.•We have developed TSVD algorithm for inversion of PSDs in DLS to improve the system's noise immunity.•A high speed photon counter was designed with seamlessly counting technology.

The measurement and analysis system of nanoparticle size distribution was developed by using virtual instrument technology, where the photon counting technology was applied in the system to replace the correlator; a high speed photon counter was designed with seamlessly counting technology to reduce the system cost and increase the accuracy. The data of nanoparticle dynamic light scattering (DLS) were analyzed in the mixed program of MATLAB and LabVIEW, where the autocorrelation functions of light scattering signals of 100 nm unimodal as well as 90 nm and 300 nm bimodal particles were inversed by truncated singular value decomposition arithmetic. Experiment results show that the peak position, peak width and symmetry of particle size distributions (PSDs) are very close to the real particles.