Sample Preparation

The importance of precise and accurate sample preparation cannot be stressed enough to customers. Garbage in = garbage out.

Sampling protocol remains the responsibility of the client. The sample submitted must be representative of your bulk sample; our lab is not liable to inspect the heterogeneity of submitted samples and process them for representative sampling.

Sub-sampling for analyses in our lab goes down to a maximum size of 50g. Therefore please keep in mind the sample size you choose to submit!

The following sample preparation methods are available:

Crushing

The Dickie and Stockler 5x3 inch jaw crusher is used to crush sample down to a 10mm size. Samples fed into the crusher cannot exceed a 70mm3 dimension.

Milling

The single pot swing mill unit uses either a tungsten-carbide or a carbon-steel milling pot to grind samples to sizes <75micron. Samples that require accurate analysis of carbide or tungsten are usually milled in the carbon-steel unit. In contrast samples that require accurate iron and steel related element analysis is milled in the tungsten-carbide unit.

Micronising

The McCrone micronising mill uses vibrating grinding actions to rapidly reduce samples for good reproducibility results. The sub-micron sizes can be achieved in any material, even in materials such as carbide, cement, clay, shale and mica samples.

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