Creating Material and Input Files for PENEPMA

EPMA Xtreme Probe

Creating Material and Input Files for PENEPMA

To create material inputs files select up to 10 standard compositions from the standard list, enter a name for the material file and click the Create PENEPMA Material File button. The program will automatically create a material file for each composition and concatenate them into a single material file for input to the PENEPMA Material.exe program. The final material file is automatically copied from the Pendbase folder to the Penepma folder for Monte-Carlo calculations using Penepma.exe. Please be patient, the creation of the material file can take a minute or more if it contains multiple complex compositions.

 

To create an input file, select the production to optimize (characteristic x-rays, backscatter electrons, continuum x-ray or secondary fluorescent x-rays), a title for the input file, beam energy, beam position, etc. and a material and geometry file. Note that geometry files are complicated and two example files are supplied, bulk.geo and couple.geo. Bulk.geo describes a geometry with a simple flat disk. It can be used with any single composition material files. Generally one enters a beam position of 0, 0, 1 which has the beam position over the center of the disk with a 10 mm (1 cm) working distance.

 

The geometry file couple.geo is also a flat disk but consisting of two sides (half pie shapes) with different compositions. It can be used with material files that have two compositions. Generally one enters a beam position offset slightly in the x axis so that secondary fluorescent modeling can occur. Values of 1e-3, 0 and 1 would position the beam 10 um from the center of the material interface, centered in y and 10 mm above the sample.

 

Once the material and the input files are created, click the PENEPMA Prompt button and enter the command: “Penepma < (input file), where (input file) is the name of the input file you just created. Depending on the number of showers simulations the calculation can take up to 24 hour or longer.

 

Note that 4 sample production files are supplied. They are:

 

          Cu_Cha.in      Sample characteristic x-ray production input file

          Cu_Back.in     Sample backscatter electron production input file (use data column- “fractional transmitted”!)

          Cu_Cont.in     Sample continuum x-ray production input file

          CuFe_Sec.in   Sample fluorescent x-ray production input file

 

If the sample production files are edited they must be edited carefully or the program will not function properly. If that occurs it may be necessary to re-extract the sample production files to the root PENEPMA folder.

 

Consult the PENEPMA.PDF help file for more information.