Materials Prep
About 2,700 etchant entries drawn from PACE’s decades of metallography work, searchable inside Materials Prep, a metallography ELN built by the PACE team and sold separately at materialsprep.com.
Free to try · Free tier for individuals.
The curated catalog is read-only inside Materials Prep. Each entry carries the reference it was drawn from.
Etchant entries drawn from PACE’s longstanding metallography work.
Material families. Steels, Stainless, Aluminum, Titanium, Copper, Magnesium, Cast Iron, Superalloys, Refractories, Ceramics, Composites, Weld zones, Electronic materials.
Etching methods. Chemical, Electrolytic, Tint, Color, Staining, Anodizing, Molten salt, Thermal, Plasma, Ion beam.
Composition, procedure, application notes, safety profile, and citation, all on one card.
Free-text across reagent name, composition, and application. Filter by material family, alloy, micro vs macro, method, and the feature the etch reveals (grain boundaries, phases, weld HAZ, prior austenite, P-segregation, and so on). Filter counts update live.
Each entry shows composition and procedure as copyable blocks, the alloy pairs it applies to, what it reveals, and a safety panel with PPE codes, GHS pictograms, and disposal notes. Variants of the same reagent (Nital 2%, Nital 5%, Beraha I/II/III) group into one card so you do not get duplicate rows.
Add custom etchants with the same fields plus a lab-private notes section for operator tips and supplier hints. They appear in the browser next to the curated entries, marked with your lab’s name, and never merge into the canonical recipes. Retiring a custom etchant leaves existing recipe steps intact.
When you add an etch step to a recipe, the catalog opens as an Advisor pre-filled with the sample’s material and alloy. One click drops composition and procedure into the step. The Mai AI assistant can also search the catalog and cite an entry directly in its reply.
No. Materials Prep is a separate software product, an electronic lab notebook for metallography, built by the PACE Technologies team and sold at materialsprep.com. This page is here so the people who came looking for our old etchant selector know where the etchant work moved to.
They are drawn from the PACE team’s metallography work over the years. Each entry carries its own reference citation inside the app. The curated catalog is read-only; lab admins and technicians add their own entries separately, scoped to their lab.
Yes. A lab can author its own etchants with the same fields as the catalog plus a lab-private notes section. They appear in the browser alongside the curated entries with the lab’s name on the card. They never merge into the canonical recipes, and retiring one preserves any existing recipe steps that cite it.
Free to try. Materials Prep is sold separately at materialsprep.com.
Built by PACE Technologies, makers of metallography sample preparation products since 1997. Sold separately from this site.