Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry: Principles and Applications for Analysis of Mineralogical and Environmental Materials

Abstract

Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) is a non-destructive compositional analysis technique, which allows the measurement in field, requiring minimum to no sample preparation. This mini-review presents the physical principles and examples of applications of pXRF for the analysis of mineralogical and environmental samples, such as rocks, soils and sediments. All examples described are from the present decade, in order to show some interesting aspect regarding elemental determination capability, result analysis, or sample preparation. Comparison between the results obtained from pXRF and other compositional analysis techniques are frequently present in order to show the positive and negative aspects of the pXRF for each type of sample.