What is EDS?

EDS is an analytical technique used for the elemental analysis or chemical characterization of samples. Elemental information is obtained by measuring the energy and intensity distribution of X-ray signals generated when the SEM focused electron beam interacts with the specimen. The information obtained can be displayed as a graph in which the position of an energy peak is characteristic of an element and the height of the peak indicates the abundance of this element in the sample. It is also possible to map the elements found in an SEM image by EDS. In that case, the elemental information is color-coded and superimposed on the different morphological features of the sample imaged by SEM.

Oxford EDS System

The Nova NanoSEM 650 is equipped with an Oxford EDS system which includes an AZtec Energy Standard with X-MaxN SDD 50sqmm, 127eV resolution detector and an X-MaxN50 detector combined with a Win7, x-stream-2 digital pulse processor and micsF+ microscope image capture system.

Software for data analyzing and elemental mapping includes:

1. AZtecEnergy Standard (Analyser, Point&lD, Mapping, Linscan, Standardisation Manager)
   
   
2. lNCA Energy250 (Navigator - Analyser Navigator and Mapping Navigator, Point & lD, The AdvisorTM, information Management System (IMS), Reporting, SmartMap, XPP Quantitative Algorithm, Data Export, Spectrum Examiner, Pile-Up Correction, Spectrum Subtraction).