Steel producers need an excellent quality control of coatings during their entire processes in order to avoid production loss, waste of coating material and achieve fastest possible control over their process. Car manufacturers need to quickly analyze different coating weights in order to keep quality at highest standards.
The analysis of metal coating is an ideal application for XRF because X-rays achieve higher penetration depths than comparable techniques. Coatings represent a variety of metallic mixtures and compounds typically used to strengthen certain features of a product to make it better fit its purpose. And the recipes for these mixtures solely depend on what the user will do with the coated product.
Typical metals used for coatings among others are titanium, aluminium, zinc, zirconium, chromates and phosphate for example for steel pre-treatment. TiN e.g. works well for machining iron-based materials. CrC with its high temperature oxidation resistance, is used in die casting while tungsten carbide/carbon (WC/C) is designed to coat and protect highly-loaded precision components, gears and gear drives, engine components and hydraulic pumps and compressors.
Common coating applications where XRF is used as standard analysis tool include for example conductive coatings on plastic. Other typical applications are metalized food packaging. XRF systems are used for the precise non-destructive measurement of coating thickness as well as for alloy coatings and in the incoming material inspection.
PANalytical solutions
The PANalytical benchtop systems like MiniPal 4 and MiniPal 2 are typical XRF tools used in metal coating analysis. For more complex tasks PANalytical offers the comprehensive Axios range of spectrometers. The FP Multi option of the SuperQ software package uses fundamental parameters to determine the thickness and composition of coatings and surface or sub-surface layers on samples.
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