AcelorMittal Realizes Time Savings with Both Thermo Scientific ARL 4460 OES and ARL ADVANT’X XRF Spectrometers

ArcelorMittal Hunedoara is located in Hunedoara county near Romania’s western border. The company produces long products – continuous cast billets, hot rolled profiles, hot rolled bars and structural steel, more particularly for tubes and profiles (IPN, UPN, IPE, UPE, etc). Their production capacities for 2012 will be  700,000 tonnes of liquid steel, 400,000 tonnes of rolled profiles and 250,000 tonnes of continuous cast billets.

The reasons why ArcelorMittal Romania has decided to buy a new Thermo Scientific* ARL* 4460 OES metals analyzer and an ARL ADVANT’X* WDXRF spectrometer are various:

    1. They had an old OE spectrometer from 1996 which had no nitrogen line
    2. Actual steel market requirements are becoming stricter and stricter
    3. Their technical team requested more and more new analyses on an increased 
        quantity of various samples (slags, powders, refractories, ferroalloys, etc.)
    4. The classical methods (chemical wet methods) they were using could not
        anymore answer to this challenge

“We have chosen your instruments,” said Daniela Samarghitan, Laboratory Deputy Manager at ArcelorMittal Hunedoara S.A. "because in the last 30 years we used them in our laboratories: namely ARL 15000, ARL 31000, ARL 34000 and ARL 72000. We have always been very satisfied in terms of quality, accuracy, reliability of results, just to mention a few of their advantages.

After the acquisition of the ARL 4460 OES metals analyzer and the ARL ADVANT’X WDXRF spectrometer in 2008, the most important benefits for us were:

• Time savings thanks to the high sample throughput (especially ARL ADVANT’X XRF spectrometer)
• Precision on analyses for both instruments
• Their capability to  analyze the new elements required (N, Sb, Zn, Mg, Zr, Ce, etc)
• Consumable savings as we can analyze nitrogen on the ARL 4460 at the same time as 20-25 other elements, preventing us from the use of a specific nitrogen analyzer (ceramic crucibles,  He spectral, energy, chemicals, for instance)
• We can analyze daily a bigger volume of samples
• We get a higher number of compounds determined on each sample

We analyze slags with Thermo Scientific slag calibration method  and the other samples with the Thermo Scientific UniQuant method. We didn’t create any new method as those fulfill all our needs.

I can only recommend your instruments to other companies and laboratories in the best terms for their good results, accuracy and reliability.”