Prohibited Materials Analysis

Certain materials and elements have been known to be harmful and hazardous to health. Using state-of-the-art X-ray Fluoresence, the Experimental Techniques Centre can determine the presence and concentration of these substances

The most commonly encountered legislation, certainly in the electronics industry, is the RoHS directive, which looks at ensuring the levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium and a number of brominated compounds and phthalates to not exceed the legislation's thresholds.

The detection limits in our X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) instrument allows us to specify which elements to look out for to determine their concentrations, which can be detected down to the parts per million (ppm) levels.

The RoHS directive specifies maximum levels for the ten restricted substances within its scope:

• Cd: <100 ppm
• Pb, Hg, Cr(VI), PBB, PBDE, DEHP, BBP, DBP, DIBP: < 1000 ppm

XRF is a non-destructive analytical technique that determines composition by measuring the secondary X-rays emitted from an initial interaction between the sample and the X-ray source. Each element has a signature energy and intensity which the secondary emissions are matched against.

For more information or to discuss your testing requirement, please contact Dr Wayne Lam at wayne.lam@brunel.ac.uk

You can return to our main Commercial Services page to see what else we have that could support your requirements.