SN Seixal is part of the Spanish Megasa Group founded in 1953. With over a thousand employees as well as 4 production plants located across the Iberian Peninsula, this company specializes in the fabrication of steel products. It has an installed capacity of over three million tons. The SN Seixal plant needs to validate the quality of various ferroalloys added to the scrap metal used to make long steel products such as rebars, wire rods, etc. They randomly analyse several samples on a monthly basis.
SN Seixal is part of the Spanish Megasa Group founded in 1953. With over a thousand employees as well as 4 production plants located across the Iberian Peninsula, this company specializes in the fabrication of steel products. It has an installed capacity of over three million tons. The SN Seixal plant needs to validate the quality of various ferroalloys added to the scrap metal used to make long steel products such as rebars, wire rods, etc. They randomly analyse several samples on a monthly basis.
The quality control department at SN Seixal now saves significant time since potential issues can be quickly detected and addressed. In fact, it used to take from 5 to 10 days to receive analytical results with the external firm. Now, performing the analysis internally allows them to obtain results in 2 to 3 days. It’s over twice as fast! The whole production process is then speeded up.
In addition to helping avoid important money loss due to inappropriate concentrations of ferroalloys in steel, the global solution offered by Malvern Panalytical experts allowed the customer to be more autonomous in his quality control process.
“We really liked the fact of dealing with only one supplier for the consultation service, fusion instrument, XRF spectrometer and software development. We know that the whole process is perfectly aligned, and that the instrument and recipes are fully compatible.” Mr. Teixeira, Megasa SN Seixal, Portugal
According to Miguel Teixeira, Material Engineer in charge of ferroalloys quality control at SN Seixal, they used to send the samples for analysis to an external firm. Over time, they felt the need to analyse the samples themselves to better control their production chain and overall quality of the ferroalloys used to make their final product. However, there were many types of samples to analyse and they didn’t have the knowledge to develop applications for all of them. They also wished to simplify the analysis and optimize the methods so they could use them for as many samples as possible.
“These methods were so clear and easy to use that our laboratory technicians would use them without any problem.” Mr. Teixeira Megasa SN Seixal, Portugal
SN Seixal contacted Malvern Panalytical experts in sample preparation to help them reach their goal. The experienced application specialists managed to develop 3 methods to use with 10 different types of samples. The material engineer felt that he could now better trust the ferroalloys added to his scrap metal since their quality was validated.
