SciAps True Demo Stories, Episode 5: The Carbon Job that Required 2 Days with Spark OES, Only Needed 3 Hours with the SciAps LIBS

‍

They had budgeted two days for testing, since they had to get up a 100-foot tower with OES. Instead, they finished the work in just three hours with our handheld LIBS analyzer. This demo took place high up on a power plant construction site in the eastern United States. They are building a combined cycle natural gas power plant, and there's never a minute to waste.

Many of the metal fabrications they use are bought prefab from Asia, and paperwork is often not available in a timely fashion. When the client construction company needed to weld some of these components together (3 locations with 20 welds in each), they needed to see for themselves if heat treatment would be required. Under instructions that heat treatment is necessary only if the carbon equivalents reading exceeds 0.45 by the AWS formula, they were initially looking for carbon testing in order to calculate carbon equivalents. When they heard that the Z-200 C+ could give results as carbon equivalents, they were delighted.

Meet the Z. It's revolutionary. Weighing in at just 4 lbs., the battery operated handheld analyzer miniaturizes the long-established laboratory technique of laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. LIBS is very similar to spark OES, except it uses a pulsed laser, rather than a cumbersome high-voltage spark system, to create the plasma. With the ease of point-and-shoot, the SciAps Z quantifies carbon, and other alloying elements, with high enough precision to also report carbon equivalents.

Light, efficient, accurate — even working in a tower 100 feet above ground, the testing flew by in just 3 hours. CE readings were on the cusp of requiring weld pre-heating, but there were enough readings above the threshold to cause the lead welding engineer to decide to heat treat everything prior to welding. While this meant more time welding, the engineers learned this in a matter of hours, not days. Get more carbon testing done faster with the SciAps Handheld LIBS!

‍