Probe SPCs

[klcrispin]

Question for you.  My current boss previously worked for Evans Analytical and he has a bug up his ass about SPCs* for all instruments in the lab.  For some reason he thinks that doing a magnification test on an SEM will magically tell us when the source is about to die.  (Not kidding - he is an XPS guy and doesn't understand electron microscopy).

Anyway, I have a bunch of SPCs that I run on the probe - spectrometer repeatability, count rates, beam stability, reference material benchmarking, on and on and on.

Do any of you have any documentation of what you routinely run as tests and the frequency and what the pass/fail criteria are?  Just wanting to see if I am in line with what other leading probe labs are doing.

John posted his spectrometer test on probe forum:  https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=210.0

Are there others like this?

*SPC=Statistical Process Control, an industry metric to how well machinery is performing

[Probeman]

In case this is useful here is a link to an abstract that discusses this issue:

https://epmalab.uoregon.edu/pdfs/Donovan_Community%20Specifications%20for%20EPMA-SEM.pdf

Also there is this topic discussing acceptance testing of new instruments, but as Kat says we should really be running at least a sub set of these tests annually on our instruments to document their performance:

https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=369.0

john