Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy (WDS)
(comparison of spectrums)
What Is It?
Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy (WDS) is a complimentary technique to Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) for performing x-ray analysis of materials to determine their elemental composition.
Why Should I Use It?
Elemental analysis by EDS suffers from several shortcomings, including high background levels and relatively poor energy resolution, which result in poorer detection limits and the inability to separate elements with peaks at similar energy. WDS overcomes these limitations. It has much higher energy resolution so that closely spaced peaks can be readily separated, and it has cleaner background levels so that detection limits are greatly improved over EDS alone. This improves elemental quantification(with the use of appropriate standards)and identification.
What Do I Get Out of It?
WDS also has a much higher sensitivity to low atomic number elements, providing much better detection of elements as low as Be and B. WDS can also be used to provide two-dimensional elemental distributions as maps.The end result is that you have a much higher confidence in the identification of the elements detected in any analysis.
Applications Include:
- Alloy composition
- Defect identification
- Mapping low atomic number second phases in steels and other alloys
- Defects in electronics and electronics packaging