3.8 Correcting for Water Content

Water content can be corrected for as a simple dilution effect, for example, if a sample contains 50% water by weight, the peak intensity can be doubled. The water content must be determined using some other lab method (e.g. loss-on-ignition), and it is likely that this can only be performed on samples larger than the original scan interval (e.g. 10 mm subsamples). A conservative approach is to use the itrax_averaging() function to re-sample the XRF data to the resolution of the water content data, or the reverse (upsampling the water content data) might be applied with caution. For some scans the Mo inc./Mo coh. varies with water content and can be used as a proxy to correct for water content.