Determining elemental composition (anything over sodium in the periodic table) of contaminants in samples is important when other means of analysis such as FTIR and GC/MS did not work. FTIR and GC/MS are useful to determine the organic structure of contaminants present, but do not do as well as SEM/EDX for identification of inorganic contaminants. Positions and concentrations of different elements in a composite can be located with either multi-elemental X-ray dot mapping or line scan analysis.

* EDX is Energy Dispersive X Ray, LOM is Light Optical Microscopy, OC is Optical Comparator, SEM is Scanning Electron Microscopy, TEM is Transmission Electron Microscopy