Zeta potential is frequently used to examine the colloidal stability of particles and macromolecules in liquids. Recently, it has been suggested that zeta potential can also play an important role for grouping and read-across of nanoforms in a regulatory context. Although the measurement of zeta potential is well established, only little information is reported on key metrological principles such as validation and measurement uncertainties. This contribution presents the results of an in-house validation of the commonly used electrophoretic light scattering (ELS) and the relatively new particle tracking analysis (PTA) methods. The performance characteristics were assessed by analyzing silica and polystyrene reference materials. The ELS and PTA methods are robust and have particle mass working ranges of 0.003 mg/kg to 30 g/kg and 0.03 mg/kg to 1.5 mg/kg, respectively. Despite different measurement principles, both methods exhibit similar uncertainties for repeatability (2%), intermediate precision (3%) and trueness (4%). These results confirm that the developed methods can accurately measure the zeta potential of silica and polystyrene particles and can be transferred to other laboratories that analyze similar types of samples. If direct implementation is impossible, the elaborated methodologies may serve as a guide to help laboratories validating their own methods.
Keywords: electrophoretic light scattering; measurement uncertainty; method validation; particle tracking analysis; reference material; silica; zeta potential.