Czech company TESCAN ORSAY HOLDING a.s. has announced the release of its next generation TESCAN TIMA G4, a dedicated solution for automated mineralogical analysis requirements for Earth Science studies as well as for mineral processing.
It says: “TESCAN TIMA delivers rapid access to actionable data across several applications: mineral quantification, petrography, metallurgy, liberation analysis, and other mineralogical or composition studies.For Earth Science studies, TIMA provides an easy to use, automated mineralogy solution that makes petrography and microanalysis faster and more efficient. TIMA is not only capable of handling modal composition routines, but also can determine the composition of entire populations of grains, producing elemental maps of all detectable elements plus the coordinates of minerals of interest.”
“The geoscience community now understands how automated mineralogy can help them ease their research” states Paul Gottlieb, TIMA Product Manager. “By providing an alternative to qualitative assessments performed at optical microscopes, TIMA allows researchers to localise minerals of specific importance quickly and provides quantitative insight to elemental compositionand morphological characterisation.”
When not in use for automated mineralogy, TIMA is a highly capable, stand-alone field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM).
Within the mining industry, TESCAN TIMA can handle high throughput mineral processing applications with minimal need for operator intervention. TESCAN TIMA automates mineral phase identification, measurement and textural data interpretation, then generates the required process mineralogy reports. “TESCAN TIMA delivers reliable and reproducible quantitative data to improve processes.”
Four EDS detectors each with their own digital pulse processor increase throughput speed for sample processing. TESCAN’s patented high sensitivity spectral summing algorithm assures accurate and reproducible quantification for low abundance elements. Additionally, TESCAN TIMA adopts the ease of use principles of TESCAN’s Essence GUI so new operators quickly become proficient and can work independently. Automation allows unattended operation for faster processing and access to reproducible quantitative data. TIMA data can be processed offline to maximise the tool time for interactive microanalysis. TESCAN TIMA shares a platform with TESCAN MIRA G4 FE-SEM so it will be familiar to users of the first generation TESCAN TIMA as well as to other TESCAN instrument users. The new generation of TESCAN TIMA includes many new hardware and software features that were developed as a result of suggestions from users.
