Open Access

The test material EDS-TM001 together with an accompanying software package, “EDX spectrometer check”, have been made available in 2009 by BAM to be employed by EDS (energy dispersive spectrometer) users to check the performance of an EDS attached to the SEM. Particularly for test laboratories operating under accreditation schemes like ISO/IEC 17025, a periodical control of the critical instrumental parameters in end-user laboratories is required. With EDS-TM001 or EDS-TM002 (second generation) test material, this periodical check is reduced to the acquisition of only one 10 kV spectrum. The software “EDX spectrometer check” is destined to evaluate automatically this spectrum and determine the performance of the EDS in terms of energy resolution and calibration as well as possible alteration of low-energy efficiency due to detector contamination. Energy resolution can be compared with the specified values according to the international ISO standard ISO 15632:2012. EDS-TM is a synthetic material consisting of a thick layer of C, Al, Mn, Cu and Zr in a well-defined composition, deposited on a steel (in case of EDS-TM001) or silicon (in case of EDS-TM002) substrate. Meanwhile, more than one hundred laboratories (most of them located in Germany) use the EDS-TM001 or EDS-TM002 test material for the periodical check of their EDS. A detailed description of the test material and software together with examples of application was published recently. New results and gained experiences will be presented as well.

In order to ground the debate on the metrics that apply for VSSA determined by adsorption isotherms and to illustrate the consequences of real bimodality for VSSA screening, a bimodal mixture has been selected for systematic investigations. A sample of BaSO4 fine was spiked with 10% g/g of BaSO4 ultrafine. The ultrafine grade is a clear nanomaterial (NM) according to the size criterion with a median Feretmin of 27 nm and the fine grade is clearly a non-NM with a median Feretmin of 249 nm. Because of the number ratio of 300:1, the mixture has to be a NM according to the size criterion. Three independent BET measurements were performed on the mixture by two different labs and resulted in a mean VSSA of 23 m2/cm3 with a standard deviation of 3.3 m2/cm3, which leads to a dminVSSA of 258 nm, and, therefore, would falsely classify the material as a non-NM. This effect was predicted earlier by calculated examples (Roebben et al. 2014) and demonstrates that mixtures of nano- and non-nano multimodal materials very likely lead to false negative classifications. Moreover, the measured VSSA values for the mixture of 23 m²/cm³ are in excellent accord with the value of 24.6 m²/cm³ predicted from the TEM size distributions of the individual materials according to the model described by JRC (Roebben et al. 2014), but are significantly different from the prediction of 309 m²/cm³ obtained from the same TEM size distribution by a particle number weighted approach (Lecloux 2015). The same is true for a 50% g/g mixture. We conclude that the mass-based VSSA approach (Roebben et al. 2014) is equal to the VSSA that is measurable by adsorption isotherms, such as from standardized BET.