Estimation of thickness using EDS

[tcsousa99]

Dear exspy community, I am really happy to learn today about the existance of this open-source project! Congrats for all the work done.

Describe the functionality you would like to see.

A method to estimate thickness using EDS spectra.

Describe the context

I am working in nuclear fusion research and studying materials for tokamaks and diagnostic systems. Recently we wanted to estimate the thickness lost of a coating before and after exposure to plasma. We measured several points in a sample (around 100) and for each point we use 5 different electron beam energies (5, 10, 15, 20, 25kV). These points are the sames for before and after, this is a general method to estimate thickness.

Then we use a old very clanky software called STRATAGem to calculate these thicknesses. But it is very hard to automate it. I think if I would use exspy it would be much quicker. I can easily extract the quantification from the Genesis EDAX sofware. But I did not find the in the user guid in esxpy a way to estimate thickness using EDS (only EELS). Is this implemented already?

Additional information

Attached is the thoery and user manual of stratagem to give an idea.

Thank you!

Stratagemus.pdf

[ericpre]

No, this is not implemented. If you are interested to contribute it, we can help and there is a contributing guide: https://github.com/hyperspy/exspy/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.rst

[tcsousa99]

Thank for the quick response, I will gadly try to find time to contribute to this!

[CSSFrancis]

@tcsousa99 This sounds great! I'm just going keep the issue open for now until this is implemented in case anyone wants to follow along/discuss here. Let us know if you have any problems or questions along the way!

[jlaehne]

Then we use a old very clanky software called STRATAGem to calculate these thicknesses. But it is very hard to automate it.

BadgerFilm from University of Wisconsin is a newer, but still hard to automate software for the same purpose:

• https://github.com/Aurelien354/BadgerFilm
• http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~johnf/badgerfilm.html

At least it is open source on GitHub, which might help with implementing the functionality in python :-)

@CSSFrancis do you know any of the people involved from the Dept. of Geoscience? Maybe one could get them in the boat.

If available in ExSpy, we might in fact find some applications for it as well.

[CSSFrancis]

@jlaehne I did not know that!

I did some WDS with Will Nachlas fairly early in my PhD. I can reach out and see if there is any interest.

I think most of their work is with dtsa2 https://www.cstl.nist.gov/div837/837.02/epq/dtsa2/index.html

[tcsousa99]

@jlaehne @CSSFrancis thank you for the extra information. I will implement it over the next months. I have a lot of work to do so I will keep it as a side task! Nevertheless I know how to do it and would love to write the code, it is also an opportunity to get some feedback on my coding!

Cheers

[tcsousa99]

@jlaehne @CSSFrancis I am now working on this over the summer, I will hopefully give more updates soon.

Have a nice summer,
Cheers.