Xmatic, one of the world’s first fully automatic end-to-end grinding and polishing solution, was launched today. Developed and produced by Struers, a leading materialographic solutions and services provider, Xmatic delivers best-in-class reproducibility and process efficiency, enabling materialographic labs to prepare more samples with fewer resources.

In today’s high-pressure industrial environments, many materialographic labs face the same issue: How to increase throughput without any loss in quality. Struers developed Xmatic to solve this challenge. By fully automating the grinding and polishing process, Xmatic enables labs to deliver more specimens with fewer resources – and with no drop in reproducibility. This will be essential in the near future, as consolidation will mean fewer manufacturers will produce larger batches across many different production sites.

“This puts greater pressure on businesses to deliver consistent product quality, globally. So, there’ll be a need for solutions that enable greater throughput, accuracy, and efficiency, ideally without incurring more cost,” says Jacob Rubæk Holm, Associate Professor in Industrial Dynamics and Quantitative Methods.

In materialographic labs, this can be achieved through automatic solutions, such as Xmatic.

32 finished specimens with just 5.5 minutes of operator time
As an end-to-end automatic solution, Xmatic handles the entire grinding and polishing process. Once the specimen holders are loaded into the machine, Xmatic completes all process steps automatically – including plane grinding, fine grinding, cleaning between steps and final polishing – and delivers clean dry specimens, ready for analysis.

As well as improving reproducibility, this drastically reduces the amount of time lab technicians spend on specimen preparation.

Xmatic can produce 32 finished specimens in around 190 minutes, but it only take s 5.5 minutes for the lab technician to set up the machine, load the specimen holders and allocate a method to each holder. Everything else is done automatically. As a result, labs can produce specimens with fewer resources, and lab technicians have time to complete more complex and challenging work, such as analysis.

Xmatic has been developed for reproducibility, process standardisation, and ease-of-use. It has an intuitive user interface that lowers the requirements for operator training, as well as a host of features to increase accuracy and throughput. These include automatic force adjustment based on the number of specimens in the holder, automatic recognition of consumables, accurate dosing control and high efficiency cleaning and drying.

For further details contact Advanced Laboratory Solutions on TEL: 011 462 1363 or visit www.advancedlab.co.za