X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis has been widely used for quality control or production control in a variety of industries because it has many positive features, such as simple sample preparation, short analysis time, and high repeatability with low human error, compared to other elemental analysis methods, such as ICP-OES or AA.

Current XRF spectrometers are also capable of analyzing non-routine samples, such as for screening, material identification or investigating newly developed materials in R&D, owing to the semi-quantitative (or standardless) analysis function using the fundamental parameter (FP) technology. Progress in the FP method has improved the accuracy of semi-quantitative analysis in XRF.

The ZSX Primus family of sequential wavelength dispersive (WD) XRF spectrometers and the bench-top WDXRF spectrometer Supermini200 all have the semi-quantitative analysis program "SQX", a scanning-based program. One feature of SQX is a "fixed angle measurement" function. The combination of scanning and fixed angle measurements improves precision in semi-quantitative analysis.

This application note demonstrates the fixed angle measurement function in SQX by taking a trace of Ti and V in a polymer as example.