Learn How Custom X-ray Standards Can Save Your Company Time and Money

You may ask why your company would need custom x-ray standards. Well, say your company is going to add a new line of steel. With several types of steel sitting in your warehouse, you would need the ability to quickly identify all of your materials. You wouldn’t want to have to cut a sample and send it out for analysis, if for some reason, the material lost its identification tag.  Or say you want to bring in material from a mill and want to know if it is “x” alloy or “y” alloy.

There are two methods to identify an alloy’s composition: shoot an x-ray gun at the material or identify it using wet chemistry.

X-ray Gun

X-ray Guns are not inexpensive, but the benefit of shooting an x-ray gun at the material is that it instantly identifies its composition. The x-ray gun works by showing certain energy peaks that identify the alloy.

Unfortunately, using this easy identification tool can create another problem. Your x-ray gun may not have come programmed with the standard you need for your unique alloy. Most machines come pre-programmed with standards, and you can buy additional standards for the machines, but the problem is that those standards are usually just for common alloys.

Wet Chemistry

The more time consuming, and likely, more expensive way to identify the material is through wet chemistry.  This can be a very long, difficult and costly process, especially if you decide to set up and staff your own in-house chemistry lab.

What if you don’t have the time for wet chemistry but your x-ray gun just has the standards for common alloys?

This is where we can help. Since we make custom alloys, we can make the high, medium and low standards necessary to program the x-ray machines to customer requirements. With the right x-ray standard you can get your answer in seconds rather than having to go through the long process of determining an answer using wet chemistry.  We make a series of standards — high, medium and low —that bracket the chemistry for the alloy in question.  These standards are then programmed into the equipment and used to calibrate it.

In the long run, making standards for your unique alloy can be less expensive than some other methods of identifying alloys.  Another benefit of having the standards is that the information can be disseminated to other machines so that the sorting and identification can be done wherever necessary throughout the organization.