It can often be the case that the volume of sample available for particle size analysis is minimal. For example, in the pharmaceutical and catalysis industries, it may be necessary to determine the particle size distribution early in the product development cycle, when only a few milligrams of material have been synthesised.

This requires the ability to perform reliable measurements on a small volume of sample, and it is desirable to be able to recover the sample for further testing.

The principle challenge associated with performing laser diffraction measurements on small sample volumes is obtaining reproducible results. Both the sampling of the material and dispersion must be controlled to obtain meaningful data. This can be difficult to achieve when there are only a few milligrams of powder available for method development and analysis.