Hi Robert, I think it's not that you are "locked-out" of some of the capabilities of your sistem, it's the physical restrictions that will not allow you to quantify some of the elements by EDS. I'm attaching a file with some basic explanation of the technique, I'm sorry if I misunderstood your question and you are already familiar with it. But mostly benchtop SEM go only up to 15 kV, I think this is the biggest restriction regarding your question.
At least theoretically you can detect all (Li and above) elements utilizing 15 kV accelerating voltage. M-series for all elements do not exceed 6 kV, so accelerating voltage should not be a problem.
May be software is set to some very special mode (I have no idea what it really could be, but it looks like software problem).
Thanks for the answers so far. The energy is not the issue as the element peaks we are interested show up within the spectrum. The issue is with the software currently not identifying and quantifying the elements we are interested in. There should be a straight forward process of adding extra elements to the current library of theoretical k-factors, correction factors, etc. I just don't know what it is.
We had a technician out today who tried but failed to open up any extra elements for EDS analysis. The technician said he would chase this up with JEOL, so fingers crossed there is a straight forward solution.
We received a software patch from JEOL to at least identify extra elements. This was a straight forward process of adding the patch to the current software. It appears it is possible to include quantification of the extra elements but seems to require extra work and would possibly come with an associated cost.
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