Diffraction analysis pioneer Hugo Rietveld was in Almelo, Netherlands, on 11 January 2008 to officially open newly refurbished facilities at Panalytical's innovation and manufacturing centre
The new parts of the site provide offices for more than 60 of Panalytical's Almelo workforce of 300 people as well as an upgraded assembly area, a new staff restaurant and a series of training suites.
Pieter de Groot, director of marketing and innovation at Panalytical, commented: "Hugo Rietveld's groundbreaking work, now known as the Rietveld method, is of great importance for accurate structure determination and quantification using X-ray diffraction.
"Rietveld analysis is important for an ever increasing number of our customers across a wide range of market segments".
John Oude Egbrink, general manager of the Almelo site, added: "The size of our production area was becoming a limiting factor for growth.
"Renewing this part of the site offers us the opportunity to expand capacity and gives us the springboard to meet customer demand for the coming years".
Guido Eggermont, commercial director, Panalytical added: "Our growth in the five years since Panalytical was incorporated into the Spectris group in 2002 has exceeded that of the market.
"For the coming years we have identified new markets, in new areas of the world and in new applications.
"We confidently expect that this will further strengthen our position as the market leader in analytical X-ray solutions".
Panalytical is a supplier of analytical instrumentation and software for X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry.
The company employs around 900 people in more than 60 countries.
Systems are widely used in research and industry, for materials and product development and process control applications in the pharmaceutical, cement, steel, petrochemical and semiconductor sectors, for example
