Automatic Preparation System for Analysis Sample

Though analysers used in the production line of the steel making industry have high accuracy and are automated, sample preparation for these analysers is still mainly done manually, and many companies are investigating and adopting automatic sample preparation processes. Especially the analysis in the production line of special steel industry must treat a great variety of steel material, and it is very difficult to get swarf samples for carbon and sulfur analysis from very hard material, and this makes it difficult to automate the sample preparation process. This time, for carbon and sulfur analysis, the authors adopt a new procedure of “cut cample and get slice sample→soften slice sample by high frequency heating→punch small tablet sample out from slice sample” instead of the current procedure of getting a swarf sample. Using this procedure, the authors developed a new automatic sample preparation machine, which makes samples for X-ray fluorescence analysis, photoelectric emission spectroscopic analysis, as well as samples for carbon, sulfur and nitrogen analysis simultaneously within 90 seconds, and thereby succeeded in establishing a fully automatic sample preparation process.