COMPLETE SOLUTIONS

New applications are emerging with new advanced materials such as composites, lightweight alloys, miniature electronics and mechanics, as well as high-performance ceramics, polymers, and metals.

Things are also moving faster with short delivery times for products and quality documentation. More and more manufacturers need fast changeovers between many different products, meaning short running in times, and optimum capacity exploitation. Quality demands require smaller tolerances, while manufacturers are experiencing higher personnel turnover and a lack of qualified operatives.

Challenges

Materialographic preparation involves many different processes. It can be difficult to keep an eye on all of the factors that define quality, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Time to improve

The hustle and bustle of a busy day leaves little time for a bird's eye view of all of your sample preparation processes.

How big a problem is time spent waiting for samples?
Could you reduce the number of preparation steps?
What could you do to reduce time spent on clamping?
Could you become less dependent on individual people?
How often do you get everything right the first time?
Is it possible to speed up your preparation process?
Do you focus on health and safety issues?

1. Layout/flow planning

How do you take samples and how do you deliver prepared samples? Is your equipment configured in line or as a cell? How do you balance your flow to make sure each step has the same capacity? Are your process steps handled by several operators or only by one? And can you trace and document all samples?

2. Type of equipment and consumables

Do you use automatic or manual equipment, and is it dedicated or for universal use? Do you need high precision or can you make do with “conventional” precision? How many samples are prepared simultaneously?

3. Methods and parameters

Can you increase cutting speed and shorten clamping time? Do you mount samples to achieve sharper edges or to make handling easier? Do you use hot mounting of single samples or more challenging cold mounting of multiple samples? Do you use as few grinding and polishing steps as possible to save time, or more steps to be sure? Do you etch to achieve higher contrast? And do you analyze or use standard verification?

How it works

The first thing you need to do is to arrange for a visit from Struers to make a quality and efficiency audit of your operation. This can easily be done without impacting your daily work.

You will receive an analysis of your methods, equipment, tools, workflows, operator skills, and safety measures, along with a proposal of how these can be improved. The result will be a complete solution for optimizing your methods, hardware, processes workflows, and skills, enabling you to deliver samples to specification on time, and ensure added customer value to your operation.

Learn more about our solutions.