Bruker S1 TITAN Handheld XRF Spectrometer Series

Look on the wonders of Petra, Jordan, an ancient city carved out of sandstone. What secrets lie within? Archaeologists ask the same question, but they go a little deeper than the over 1 million tourists who visit the site each year—into the very stone itself.  XRF testing is a technique that harnesses the power of x-ray fluorescence. With XRF, researchers gain insight into what the stone is made of, how old it is, even where it came from, down to the smithy where the tools were forged that chiseled out its famed pillars. You can find test personnel firing XRF guns at samples in everything from archaeology to alloy fabrication, mining, identifying precious metals, inspecting consumer goods, and art conservation. To understand modern XRF testing, however, you need to know what an XRF gun is.   What is an XRF Gun? An XRF gun is a non-destructive tool designed to perform elemental analysis on materials. XRF guns, formally called XRF analyzers or XRF machines, perform measurements by harnessing the power of X-ray fluorescence (XRF), specifically what is called energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence (EDXRF). The XRF gun fires x-rays at the sample under test, causing the sample to emit fluorescent x-rays, and each element reacts by releasing a unique ‘fluorescent fingerprint’. XRF analyzers capture these identifying fluorescent signals. Once the measurement is taken, the gun identifies the contributing elements and gives a comprehensive report of the sample’s elemental composition. A user can perform an XRF analysis in mere seconds, thanks to the speed of EDXRF technology and the simple point-and-shoot functionality of portable XRF equipment. XRF guns are also lightweight, handheld devices, some weighing as little as 3 lbs (1.36 kg), that can nonetheless perform laboratory-grade analysis. This makes them invaluable in remote field applications. XRF devices inspect everything from