Manufacturers in a variety of industries, including the automotive, aviation, pharmaceutical, and steelmaking, maintain high quality standards for the products they produce. The Quality by Design (QbD) that has started taking root in the pharmaceutical industry is slowly expanding to encompass other industry standards as well. QbD demands that manufacturers have an understanding of the entire creation process, and results in assured product quality during product creation. In efforts to comply, industries have taken a close look at the production process and what foreign particles are making it into final products that can cause failures.
Cleaning the contaminants, thereby enhancing the quality of the end product, is a critical step for manufacturers. Being able to monitor and isolate foreign particles allows for tighter control over how many and what type of particles make it into the final product. By overseeing these particles during the creation process, higher standards of quality can be achieved. To this end, manufacturers have been employing the use of scanning electron microscopes to identify contaminants and help reduce the number of foreign particles included in the final product.
Electron beam particle analysis has proved itself to be a powerful, practical technique to understand particle distribution. The Aspex Personal Scanning Electron Microscope (PSEM) comes equipped with its Industrialized Electron Beam Analyzers and several choices of software bundles that integrate with the microscopes, turning them into fully-integrated, automated detection machines. By adding the PSEM directly into the production line, the particles can be monitored anywhere in the creation process.
The PSEM equipped with the Automated Analysis software platform accurately counts and sizes particles, identifying possible contaminants and analyzing the elemental composition. Once the particles are identified, manufacturers can focus on analyzing where the problem is coming from, upstream in the production line or within additives that aren’t pure enough. Capable of sizing and analyzing micron-level debris, the PSEM with the Automated Analysis Software far surpasses other current optical and gravimetric inspection techniques.
The PSEM by Aspex allows auto makers to check the level of contaminants in oil and engine parts; steelmakers to maintain strict regulations on the inclusions that would otherwise make the steel too brittle; pharmacists and chemists to understand exactly what foreign particles are included in a new drug sample. The Automated Analysis software is a reliable, fast way for many industries to utilize the PSEM in order to maintain high standards of quality control and eliminate contaminants, creating top-of-the-line products that consumers demand.
Reference:
Aspex, http://www.aspexcorp.com/industries/industrial-automation.html
