METHOD FOR IDENTIFICATION OF UNKNOWN SUBSTANCES

摘要

The present invention relates to a method for determining the mineral composition of an unknown substance using a set of samples of known substances and an x-ray dispersive analysis system. According to the invention, a training database is created from x-ray spectra obtained from the set of known substances (100). Next, a fuzzy classification system (200) is derived from the training database. X-ray spectra are then collected from a sample of the unknown substance (300) and these spectra are processed by the fuzzy classification system to determine a candidate substance that most closely matches the x-ray spectra from the sample (400). This candidate substance is then accepted or rejected using a confidence measure (500).