Spend a Day at Our Applications Laboratory in Leeds

The standard ISO 11464 12.96 stipulates the determination of inorganic hazardous substances in soils. For most soil samples it is sufficient to separate the coarser grains above 2mm by sieving and only examine the finer particles. ALcontrol were testing 150g samples dried at 35°C to prevent the loss of volatiles, pre-crushed to 10.0mm (if required) and the whole sample milled to a fine and homogenous powder.

Rapid preparation of the sample, avoidance of contamination from any contact surfaces of the mill and ease of cleaning were of paramount importance in selecting instruments to cope with this high throughput demand to avoid a bottle neck at the analytical instruments.

ALcontrol Laboratories approached Retsch (UK) Ltd to help solve this problem and they were invited to spend a day at our Applications Laboratory in Leeds. Darren Rose, Laboratory Manager at ALcontrol brought a variety of different samples to Leeds to test Retsch instruments and see how they handled difficult samples. A number of the samples ALcontrol deal with contain very hard material such as concrete which in the past has proved difficult and time consuming to mill.

Following extensive timed suitability trials the solution to their problem was to use two BB200 Jaw Crushers to pre-crush coarse material to
Typical milling times were reduced from approximately two minutes on the previous instruments to 8 seconds using the RS200 at 1,200rpm thus meeting the high demand with ease. “The instruments we used to use at ALcontrol would take a considerable amount of time to mill a sample. Retsch have not only reduced this time but also improved the quality as the 8 second grinding time allows us to achieve a perfect particulate size of 212µm. This gives us a proper representative sample for the customer”.