White Paper

Simple, Easy, Powerful Identification Software for XRF Spectrometers

What spectrometers do, and how they do it, rely on complex technologies applied to abstruse principles of physics or chemistry. But that doesn’t mean that spectrometers should be complicated to operate.

In most widely used energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF) instruments, for example, analysis results for each element in a sample are displayed in percentages, or in parts per million (ppm). The user then further interprets these numbers to arrive at a conclusion or make a process decision. These kinds of quantitative analytical metrics are often needed for complex or challenging analyses that a powerful spectrometer may undertake. However, in many other applications — including numerous production and research analyses in chemicals, cosmetics, primary metals production, plastics, and oil & fuel — precise quantification is not actually necessary, or helpful.

In many cases, all that’s really required of even a high-performance analyzer is a qualitative result, such as a positive material identification (PMI): “Yes, that’s this alloy grade.” In others, the only result the user needs is the closest match within a preconfigured database: “That’s (probably) from Supplier C.”

This paper focuses on a tool designed to answer these needs with a refined combination of speed, simplicity, flexibility, usability, and analytical power: Ident software from SPECTRO Analytical Instruments.