Preparation of aluminum thin films and laminates

In the sector of flexible primary packaging for food and pharmaceutical aluminum films and film laminates are currently undergoing a transformation toward the use of a steadily increasing proportion of recycled material. Further development of the metallographic sample preparation of these composite materials is required to ensure that the often subtle changes in the material involved can be analyzed in a meaningful way. The conventional preparation technique using microtome sections is compared to an analysis of metallographic sections on the example of two laminate structures. This method is intended to replace microtome sections for layer thickness analyses and present a correlative approach in the field of material and structural analysis. Mechanical preparation allowed achieving sufficient sample qualities and visualizing the basic structure of the laminates under investigation. The two methods were furthermore correlated.