We’ve been experimenting with better ways to quantify the quality of XRD tubes in the shop. We use these tests on new and used tubes to monitor performance in two key areas. 1) Intensity 2) Spectral purity. What we’ve settled on is a test that involves a wavelength-dispersive approach which gives us a lot of intensity to work with while eliminating background scatter and fluorescence effects. Basically, we’re able to extract more information from the data because the “noise” is almost
Energy-dispersive detectors have been in use on XRD systems for decades, but have always come with caveats. Low energy resolution, Liquid nitrogen cooling, slow start-up and tedious/cryptic tuning controls have limited their popularity in many applications. Silicon Drift technology solves most of these issues and modern electronics covers the rest. The new KSA-SDD system for X-ray diffraction utilizes a full spectrum EDXRF detector which is fully software tuned. The result is a detection system with high enough energy resolution to