Conclusion

Mercury porosimetry is a particularly interesting technique for characterizing powders and porous materials. Its strong point is that it is a "multi-scale" experiment, enabling pore sizes from a few nanometers to a hundred micrometers to be assessed, which is unique. It's also fast, taking just two hours to characterize a sample in most cases. It is perfectly complementary to gas adsorption methods, which are limited to the micro-meso range. Generally speaking, it gives access to the size distribution of pore entrances.

Disadvantages include waste management, of course, but also a number of scientific issues. These are either specific to mercury, or to the use of a capillary phenomenon, as in the case of gas adsorption. What is specific to mercury is the use of a contact angle, the value of which is generally not directly measurable on the sample under study. We...