Spectrometer enables purer alloys

The ARL 4460 high performance optical emission spectrometer allows steel producers to perform increasingly accurate and precise measurements that guarantee the quality of their alloys.

With the ARL 4460 high performance optical emission spectrometer from Thermo Electron Corp, steel producers can now perform - in addition to increasingly accurate and precise measurements that guarantee the quality of their alloys - improved analysis of the elements carbon (C), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P) and sulphur (S) at very low levels.

The increased sensitivity of the ARL 4460 metals analyser allows the cost-effective manufacture of cleaner steels.

The ARL 4460 can detect extremely low levels of gaseous elements in steel very rapidly.

Results are typically available within 55 seconds after just two runs.

Costly and much slower combustion analysers traditionally used to detect C, N, O, P and S elements are now more and more redundant.

This allows manufacturers to significantly reduce their production and operating costs.

Detection limits obtained with Thermo's ARL 4460 metals analyser - 0.4ppm on C, 1.5ppm on N, 8ppm on O, 0.3ppm on P and 0.7ppm on S down from 1.5ppm on C, 2.7ppm on N, 15ppm on O - considerably improve quantitative analysis.

Accuracy, stability and precision are further parameters that benefit from the ARL 4460's new levels of performance - for example, precision is 0.4ppm at 10ppm C and 0.8ppm at 20ppm N.

The analytical results achieved with the ARL 4460 are all the more significant given the pressures on the steel industry to improve quality control systems and processes.

Thermo's metal analysers have already been deployed in hundreds of plants around the world and routinely measure important trace elements.

They are constantly being upgraded based on customer feedback to offer better levels of detection.

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