TESCAN ORSAY HOLDING has announced the release of its next-generation TESCAN TIMA, a dedicated solution for automated mineralogical analysis for industrial mineral processing and earth sciences.

TESCAN TIMA delivers rapid access to actionable data across several applications, including mineral quantification, petrography, metallurgy, liberation analysis and other mineralogical or composition studies.

For the mining industry, TESCAN TIMA handles high throughput industrial mineral processing applications with minimal need for operator intervention, according to the company. It 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,” the company said.

Marek Dosbaba, Product Manager, TESCAN, said: “The geosciences community now understands how automated mineralogy can help them ease their research. By providing an alternative to qualitative assessments performed with optical microscopes, TIMA allows researchers to localise minerals of specific importance quickly and provides quantitative insight to elemental composition and morphological characterisation.”

Four energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy detectors, each with their own digital pulse processor, increase throughput speed for sample processing, while TESCAN’s patented high-sensitivity spectral summing algorithm assures accurate and reproducible quantification for low abundance elements, the company says.

TIMA adopts the ease-of-use principals of TESCAN’s Essence graphical user interface so new operators can quickly become proficient and work independently, according to TESCAN. Automation of the process, meanwhile, 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.

When not in use for automated mineralogy, TIMA is a highly capable, standalone field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), TESCAN says. It shares a platform with the TESCAN MIRA G4 FE-SEM so will be familiar to users of TESCAN’s first generation.