| Computer controlled electron microprobe microanalysis of miscroscopic particles allows to collect simultaneously chemical and morphological characteristics.; In this work, firstly a method is described to select the analysis parameters, as well for the energy dispersive X-ray analysis as for the localisation and sizing of the analysed particles.; Next, a standardless ZAF correction algorithm is described to calculate the elemental composition from the intensities of the characteristic X-ray lines emitted by the analysed object. In these calculations, the particle size is taken into account for the calculation of the ZAF correction factors.; Automated analyses of typically 1000 particles result in very large data matrices that can only be interpreted by the application of suitable data reduction methods. Various cluster methods and principal component analyses were described and illustrated.; Mostly, the morfological characterization by means of simple shape factors is insufficiently typical. A method was developed to describe the particle morphology by terms of the Fourier transformed contour function. Also the possibility to classify these Fourier descriptions was investigated.; The totality of this methodology, together with its typical problems, were illustrated by a complete chemical characterization of a South American background aerosol, and of an aerosol that was generated by spark erosion. The characteristics of oil fly ash particles were related to the parameters of the burning process in a power plant. Finally, an automated method was developed to determine the tridimensional sizes of thin laminar particles. |
