— Lieven Kempenaers, Product Manager XRF, Malvern Panalytical

“Revontium expands our comprehensive offering in the XRF instrument market.”

— Mark Fleiner, President, Malvern Panalytical

Patented Speed Optimizations for Alloy Sorting

Speed, not just sensitivity, has become a key differentiator in portable XRF technology, particularly for industrial alloy sorting and scrap metal recycling applications where throughput directly determines economic viability. A patent held by SciAps Inc., invented by Donald W. Sackett, describes a handheld XRF analyzer with a dedicated aluminum alloy algorithm that operates at optimized tube voltage and current settings, roughly 10 to 11 kV and 300 to 500 μA, specifically tuned for detecting magnesium, silicon, and the transition metal alloying elements common in aluminum alloys.5 Rather than following the industry-standard dual-beam measurement approach, in which sequential high- and low-voltage tests typically require 10 to 60 seconds per sample, this optimized single-beam protocol delivers results in approximately 1 to 4 seconds for nearly 90% of aluminum alloys, automatically switching to a higher-voltage, lower-current measurement only when the initial fast scan fails to detect the expected alloying elements or cannot definitively distinguish between similar alloy compositions.5 This kind of adaptive, application-specific measurement protocol illustrates how portable XRF performance gains increasingly come from smarter measurement algorithms rather than purely from detector or X-ray tube hardware improvements.

Artificial Intelligence Reaches Field-Portable XRF

As with other spectroscopic techniques covered in this series, artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded directly into X-ray instrumentation rather than applied only in postacquisition data analysis. The XOS portable energy-dispersive XRF (EDXRF) system is described as integrating real-time, AI-assisted spectral interpretation, together with sulfur analysis per ASTM D4294 and measurement of up to 12 elements from phosphorus through zinc at sub-ppm levels, reducing the need for operators to manually interpret overlapping elemental peaks during field deployments.3 Complementing this trend, Andric and colleagues used an autoencoder neural network to compress raw EDXRF spectra collected from canvas paintings into a small set of informative features, enabling efficient classification of the paintings by period of creation while reducing processing time and manual expert work compared with conventional multivariate data reduction.6

X-Ray Diffraction: From Postblast Forensics to Meteorite Mineralogy

X-ray diffraction continues to serve as the definitive technique for crystalline phase identification across remarkably disparate applications. In forensic science, Estevanes, Jernigan, Zall, and Monjardez combined confocal Raman microscopy with single-crystal XRD to characterize ammonium nitrate residues in ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) recovered from postblast substrates after the controlled detonation of two improvised explosive devices. The lattice-vibration spectra of the postblast residues differed from those of intact ammonium nitrate, a change the authors attributed to thermally driven phase transitions, and single-crystal XRD independently confirmed the structural changes. Although the authors describe the work as a fundamental study of ammonium nitrate phase behavior rather than a forensic application per se, it has clear implications for reconstructing explosive device composition and detonation conditions in postblast investigations.3

In planetary science, powder XRD confirmed the characteristic aubrite mineral assemblage (enstatite, olivine, plagioclase feldspar, metal sulfides, and iron oxides) in the Tiglit meteorite, which fell in Morocco in 2021, while complementary Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS) also revealed unexpected phases, including calcite (attributed to terrestrial weathering), the high-temperature silica polymorphs quartz and cristobalite, and carbon phases. Together, these findings broaden the recognized compositional range of aubrite-class meteorites and point to a more complex formation and alteration history than previously attributed to this meteorite class.3

X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy: Refining Surface and Battery Characterization

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) continues to advance as the definitive surface-sensitive elemental and chemical-state characterization technique. Wang, Mueller, and Crumlin proposed three more reliable alternatives to the common practice of assigning the O 1s feature near 531–532 eV directly to oxygen vacancies in XPS spectra of metal oxides: monitoring changes in cation valence state, evaluating normalized surface oxygen-to-cation stoichiometry, and tracking binding-energy shifts attributable to electron doping, thereby addressing a long-standing ambiguity in the interpretation of oxide surface chemistry.3

In battery research, XPS provides surface-sensitive characterization of the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) in lithium-ion batteries, including composition, oxidation-state mapping, and degradation product identification, complementing the bulk elemental and structural information that XRF and XRD provide and giving battery researchers a more complete, multitechnique picture of electrode degradation mechanisms over repeated charge–discharge cycling.3

Summary and Conclusions

X-ray analytical techniques are advancing along several parallel tracks simultaneously: microbeam XRF is democratizing spatial resolution once exclusive to synchrotron facilities, compact and portable instruments are extending quantitative, regulatory-grade analysis into field and point-of-need settings, and artificial intelligence is beginning to automate spectral interpretation directly at the point of acquisition rather than requiring specialized postprocessing expertise. Across XRD forensic and planetary applications and XPS battery and surface-chemistry research, these techniques continue to provide structural and chemical-state information unobtainable by vibrational or electronic spectroscopy alone.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for attosecond pulse generation, while methodologically distinct from routine XRF, XRD, and XPS analysis, underscores the continued fundamental importance of X-ray and X-ray-adjacent electromagnetic radiation to probing atomic and electronic structure, connecting applied analytical instrumentation to the frontiers of basic physics research.

From attosecond-scale fundamental physics to seconds-scale alloy sorting on a factory floor, the X-ray techniques surveyed here share a common thread: each advance trades some dimension of measurement, whether spatial resolution, acquisition speed, instrument footprint, or required operator expertise, for broader practical deployability without sacrificing the elemental and structural specificity that has always been X-ray analysis’s defining strength.

Future Outlook

Expect continued miniaturization and cost reduction in both XRF and XRD instrumentation, following the trajectory demonstrated by Malvern Panalytical’s Revontium system, as vendors compete to bring floor-standing-equivalent performance to compact, lower-power benchtop and portable form factors. AI-assisted spectral interpretation, already deployed in field-portable EDXRF systems, is likely to expand further into XRD phase identification and XPS peak deconvolution, reducing the specialized expertise historically required to interpret complex, overlapping X-ray spectral data.

Microbeam XRF’s continued commercialization should further expand access to spatially resolved elemental mapping for agricultural, food safety, and packaging applications, narrowing the capability gap between synchrotron facilities and laboratory benchtop instrumentation. Meanwhile, as battery and semiconductor research continues to demand ever more precise surface and interfacial characterization, expect deeper integration between XPS, XRF, and complementary techniques such as Raman and infrared microspectroscopy, discussed elsewhere in this series, within unified multimodal characterization platforms rather than as separate, sequentially operated instruments.

As Nobel-recognized attosecond techniques continue to mature within fundamental physics research, expect gradual translation of some underlying ultrafast X-ray methodologies toward specialized time-resolved materials characterization applications, further narrowing the historical divide between basic physics instrumentation and applied analytical chemistry.

References

(1) The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Electrons in Pulses of Light: Popular Science Background, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023. NobelPrize.org, October 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/popular-information/ (accessed 2026-08-12).

(2) American Physical Society. Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Techniques to Produce Ultrashort Pulses of Light. APS News, October 3, 2023. https://www.aps.org/about/news/2023/10/nobel-prize-physics (accessed 2026-08-12).

(3) Workman, J., Jr.; Wetzel, W. X-Ray Spectroscopy Analysis: Techniques and Applications Across Science and Industry. Spectroscopy Online, July 6, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/x-ray-spectroscopy-analysis-techniques-and-applications-across-science-and-industry (accessed 2026-08-12).

(4) Malvern Panalytical Launches Compact XRF Spectrometer. Metal AM, April 10, 2024. https://www.metal-am.com/malvern-panalytical-launches-compact-xrf-spectrometer/ (accessed 2026-08-12).

(5) Sackett, D. W. Portable, Hand Held Aluminum Alloy XRF Analyzer and Method. US 11 169 100 B2, 2021. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11169100B2/en (accessed 2026-11-03).

(6) Andric, V.; Kvascev, G.; Cvetanovic, M.; et al. Deep Learning Assisted XRF Spectra Classification. Sci. Rep. 2024, 14 (1), 3666. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-53988-z.