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Materials failure analysis with SEM-EDS
At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we understand the increasing pressures that today’s industrial laboratories face in achieving accurate, reliable, and consistently high-quality material compositional analysis at speed and on budget.
For laboratory and quality assurance managers in particular, results often need to be delivered with fewer skilled staff and limited budget and equipment. This in turn limits both the quality and quantity of your research while putting added pressure on the R&D team.
This is especially true in certain materials science applications like product failure investigation and contaminant identification where samples need to be analyzed in depth at every point in their lifecycle to determine thickness, size, and precise elemental composition.
Addressing the challenges of SEM-EDS data analysis
Until very recently, the standard industry response to this challenge was to combine the scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) used to acquire structural information with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) detectors and software that are capable of providing elemental analysis and chemical characterization of a sample on scales ranging from tens of centimeters down to less than a micrometer.
In essence, EDS provides critical, additional information that can guide analysis in directions that would not be possible using only a SEM image. However, the major drawback of manually bridging SEM and EDS technologies is that data interpretation can be challenging and time consuming, often due to difficulty in finding the correct area to analyze based on limited information in the BSE images.
Thermo Scientific ChemiSEM Technology offers a better way to complete this work. It is an integrated SEM-EDS solution that is ideal for complex analysis of many materials, including metals, ceramics, batteries, coatings, cements, and soft materials.
For lab teams, it provides a single, foolproof solution that is easy to install and use, always live, and able to deliver reliable results with minimal preparation and minimal training. For organizations, it increases both the quality and quantity of material analysis you can perform, reduces downtime, and delivers higher throughput.
While boosting efficiency can often lead to compromises on quality, that is not the case with ChemiSEM Technology. It is unique in its ability to achieve both objectives and more, lowering cost-per-sample while providing an early warning system for quality control issues.
For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.