Excitation factor is one of the key factors in the calculation of theoretical intensities in X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. In this work, four commonly used compilations for calculating excitation factors were compared. An experiment was carefully designed and performed to test the validity of these calculated excitation factors in which eight pairs of X-ray lines that were close to each other in energy were measured using synthetic samples. The ratios of the measured intensities of the line pairs were then compared with those from theoretical calculation using different compilations of excitation factors. it was found that the relative errors between calculated theoretical intensity ratios using the excitation factors in the modified version of NRLXRF program and the measured values were the least.

Key words: X-RAY FLUORESCENCE SPECTROMETRY