This success story is about a customer that owns many laboratories to conduct precise and accurate analytical testing of all kinds of geological samples. According to the global XRF Technology Manager, the borate fusion technique has been used in the company’s test labs since the early 90’s to prepare samples.
Since sometimes hundreds of samples are produced per day in one of its labs, it was decided to move to automated fusion to better support production volume, to reduce employee costs and to obtain better consistency in final analytical results.
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This success story is about a customer that owns many laboratories to conduct precise and accurate analytical testing of all kinds of geological samples. According to the global XRF Technology Manager, the borate fusion technique has been used in the company’s test labs since the early 90’s to prepare samples.
Since sometimes hundreds of samples are produced per day in one of its labs, it was decided to move to automated fusion to better support production volume, to reduce employee costs and to obtain better consistency in final analytical results. The customer bought automated fusion instruments for many of its laboratories worldwide for the same reasons.
The XRF Technology Manager explains that the automated fusion instruments they used to first work with were supplied by gas. The company soon faced a major issue: the quality of propane would vary depending on the region of the world where it was used. Since there was no consistent supply of good gas for laboratories located in remote areas, it soon affected productivity.
In some locations, gas quality has never been an issue. However, the sample throughput became so high that there was a need for higher productivity and lower instrument downtime.
The customer decided to kill two birds with one stone by buying a heavy-duty electric fusion machine. They replaced the previous fluxers with a Claisse® 6-position TheOx® Advanced instrument. According to the XRF Technology Manager, they chose to buy Malvern Panalytical instruments since they trusted the quality of their brands and were satisfied with the service.
“Most importantly, we loved the synergetic relationship that we had with the supplier. Their experts would always provide us with customized recipes to improve our production targets, they were also very responsive to constructive criticism”.
The high productivity of TheOx Advanced, its low downtime and increased analytical performance (in the measurement of fluorine for example) encouraged the purchase two more of these 6-position instruments in 2018.
The gas issue was automatically solved for all of the company’s labs analyzing samples in remote locations worldwide. But there is more to come: in a little more than one month using TheOx Advanced, one of their laboratories saw almost a 55% production increase in the number of fusions performed.
In the same time frame, the same laboratory went from 1500 re-preparations with the previous instruments to only 120 re-preparations with the new instrument, meaning that the re-preparation rate dropped from 12% to 3%. They therefore saved an enormous amount of valuable time for operators to perform other useful functions.
