Engineered Nanoparticles and Their Identification Among Natural Nanoparticles

Due to the huge excess of natural nanoparticles, the identification and quantification of engineered nanoparticles is a big challenge to the analyst. Moreover, identification in a qualitative sense and quantification by mass concentration alone is not sufficient since the potential environmental hazard arising from engineered nanoparticles is controlled by a number of further properties of the particles. The most important methods of nanoparticle fractionation and nanoparticle detection are discussed. It is shown that coupled techniques are increasingly applied. Dedicated techniques that are tailored to the search for a certain targeted engineered nanoparticle are more promising than universal approaches that aim at the search for any engineered nanoparticles. Analyses should not rely on only one method but several complementary methods should be used.