Thermo Electron announces the 1000th customer order of its ARL 4460 optical emission (OE) spectrometer, from Voest Alpine Industrieanlagebau (VAI)
This vacuum spectrometer is recognized as the best performing instrument for metal analysis available on the market.
The ARL 4460 features two unique techniques, Thermo's patented current controlled source (CCS) and time resolved spectroscopy (TRS), establishing this innovative instrument as the benchmark for accurate and reliable metal analysis in primary plants, foundries, forges, mini-mills and casting mills.
The milestone order was received from Voest Alpine Industrieanlagebau (VAI).
VAI purchased the instrument for Alchevsk Iron and Steel Works, a very important steel plant based in Alchevsk, Ukraine, who are one of the metallurgical businesses of Industrial Union of Donbas (IUD).
Founded in 1956, VAI is an engineering company supporting steel applications by building complete plants, or providing machines for use in steel production, for example ladle furnaces, continuous casting machines and converters.
To date, VAI has completed more than 1800 projects in more than 80 countries worldwide.
Thermo's long-standing relationship with VAI has resulted in over 25 years of OE and X-ray instrument orders and approximately 45 units have been sold to them.
Launched in 1994, the ARL 4460 is continuously being improved.
The two latest additional techniques are the CCS and TRS.
These significantly reduce the analysis time to less than a minute and improve all analytical figures of merit in OE (detection limits, precision, accuracy, stability, etc).
Two further additions to Thermo's ARL 4460 are the on-line Spark-DAT option, allowing cleanliness statements and inclusion determinations and the CNO option permitting the determination of the C, N and O elements in steel at their lowest levels.
Dan Shine, vice president of elemental analysis at Thermo, comments: "Our ARL 4460 OE spectrometer has proven to be a very valuable tool, designed to meet all metals analysis requirements from routine use to metals research and achieves superior analytical performance, even in the most demanding laboratory conditions.
"Furthermore, each instrument is customized prior to delivery in order to meet specific needs.
"Due to these unique characteristics, the ARL 4460 has encountered increasing success with customers regularly purchasing or upgrading to new models.
"This 1000th order is clearly a testament of our customers' trust in the instrument's quality and reliability".
