Up to now, morphological studies of the multi-component polymeric materials have been carried out by various microscopic and scattering methods. Optical microscopes, transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) and atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are commercially available and widely used. The biggest advantage of microscopy is that they provide intuitive real-space representations of the various morphologies. However, when it comes to “measurements”, especially in a quantitative way, microscopy sometimes lacks a statistical accuracy due to the small field of view. In contrast, the scattering methods provide much a superior statistical accuracy than that of microscopy simply because the observation volume is larger than that of the microscopes. One must remember, however, that the scattering methods normally require “(hypothesized) models” for data analysis in advance: They do not provide an intuitive insight into the morphologies as does microscopy. After all, for the complete characterization of a specific morphology, one may need to first know the morphologies from the microscopy and subsequently to evaluate the structural parameters by scattering on the basis of the morphology; the two methods are complementary.
