Overcoming Peak Overlaps in Titanium- and Vanadium-Bearing Materials with Multiple Linear Least Squares Fitting

Abstract The evolution of the energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) from the lithium-drifted silicon detector [Si(Li)] to the silicon drift detector (SDD) has created new opportunities in the field of electron probe X-ray microanalysis. The SDD permits operation at significantly higher count rates than the Si(Li) and also provides a more stable energy scale. X-ray spectra captured by EDS can now be analyzed qualitatively or quantitatively under the same beam conditions as used for wavelength dispersive spectrometry (WDS). Standards-based quantitative EDS (SB-Quant-EDS) can thus provide analyses that are accurate and precise for an ever growing number of materials measurement problems. In this study, we analyze NIST research glasses with “known” nominal concentrations of titanium (Ti) and vanadium (V) to evaluate the external reproducibility of the SB-Quant-EDS technique in the presence of severe peak overlaps. We additionally analyze several naturally occurring oxide minerals by WDS and EDS simultaneously and evaluate the outputs of these two methods when quantifying the same analytical volume within the sample.