Chemical Analysis

Written by Sachin Kulshreshtha | Updated: September 17, 2025

Chemical Analysis

Chemical analysis is routinely performed to identify unknown components, obtain physical characteristics or chemical composition, and determine the quality of materials. Every product is subjected to routine chemical analysis during multiple phases of the development, production, or manufacturing processes.

Material Identification and Compositional Analysis: A variety of stand-alone or combination analytical techniques are available to separate, identify, and quantify a mixture’s constituents. Elemental or chemical composition can be obtained to deduce the chemical make-up of complex matrices. Furthermore, rapid physical, visual, and structural characterization can also be performed and used for substance identification. There are powerful tools to detect particles, additives, residue, organic or inorganic materials using bulk, surface, or thin layer analysis of samples.
Contaminant and Residue Analysis: Determining a chemical’s purity or product quality is an essential step in quality control, regulator compliance, raw material testing, etc. Whether the contaminant is suspected or unknown, it can be identified and characterized using a standard or multi-technique approach. Trace elements and foreign particle detection, off-color, off-gassing, extractables and leachables studies, etc can be performed, for a wide range of products, including packaging, metals, alloys, additives, coatings, consumer products, plastics, food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc.
Investigative Analysis: Investigative chemical analysis of materials or products involve studies to detect and analyze components that cause physical, chemical, or structural failure of materials (failure analysis), root cause of a failure, comparative studies of expected vs. failed products, and reverse engineering or deformulation of new materials and products in the market.

Choosing the right combination of tools depends on the type of material or sample matrix and the analytical problem at hand.

Techniques