There are growing demands for mineral resources around the world, and rapid and accurate elemental analysis is required at a satellite laboratory in a mining site for quality check, geological resource survey, etc. One of the Rigakus solutions for such requirements is the compact-size light-weight benchtop wavelength dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (WDX), Supermini.
Although a benchtop energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (EDX) is commonly used for an elemental analysis, WDX, with its superior spectral resolution and light-element sensitivity, is more suitable for the analysis of rocks and minerals, because they usually contain a large number of light- and heavy- element oxide components,
Supermini is equipped with a newly developed high power air cooled 200-W X-ray tube, which has about 4 to 6 times higher sensitivity than that of a former benchtop spectrometer. This enables an XRF analysis of a sample with high precision. This paper reports the results of an XRF analysis of rocks using a Supermini spectrometer.