Cawood in the UK was previously processing samples manually for thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), which involved dosing and weighing thousands of samples per day, placing them into TGA’s, and then removing them from the TGA’s after analysis. These tasks were time-consuming and repetitive. Their goal was to improve efficiency, increase capacity, and allow unattended operation.
Cawood made the decision to engage HF in order to explore potential solutions to the challenges that they were facing. HF has many years of experience in building and supplying high-quality dosing systems and TGA furnaces for the mining industry, making it a safe decision to trust HF with this project. HF designed this robust and reliable system to perform automated thermogravimetric analysis (TGA).
A dosing and weighing module are linked to a robot arm, with the TGA furnaces arranged in a semi-circle around the robot which moves carousels of samples in and out of the ovens. The TGA system performs reliably and met its nameplate capacity within the first few days of operation on-site.
This laboratory design allows easy expansion and customisation for different analytical methods and sample preparation processes.