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30th June 2022 | Author: Hui Jiang
The technical cleanliness of components is at the centre of most industrial manufacturing processes, as it is crucial to ensure a high-quality finished products.
The assessment of the level of cleanliness of components is applicable in a wide range of industries, e.g. any involving the manufacture of mechanical devices, such as the automotive and aerospace industries.
The presence of particulate contamination can have a major impact on performance, lifetime and reliability of the system. It will cause an increase in the wear rates of the system in the early life and may even cause failures. Therefore, it is important that a high degree of cleanliness is maintained during the manufacturing processes, and precise information on the contaminants is required to identify their sources. As a result, an assessment of cleanliness as part of quality control is crucial to ensuring consistent product performance
In order to know if particle levels are within acceptable limits, and in order to attempt to identify the source of particles, it is important to know both their composition and morphology so that the manufacturing processes can be monitored and optimised.
Historically, light optical microscopy was used to count and measure particles. This process requires time, limits the minimum particle size that can be detected and does not provide compositional information. The use of scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Energy Dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) greatly improves the analysis, as higher magnifications can be used, and composition and morphology can be combined on a particle-by-particle basis. Furthermore, the data can be collected under full automation.
Throughput is often a major consideration for analyses in this sector. The solution is to use a large sensor area EDS to capture more counts giving both speed and high data quality. The range of Ultim Max EDS detectors provides the capability for this analysis. By using sensor sizes up to 170 mm2, more X-rays can be captured per second. This means that less time is needed to accurately analyse a sample. These detectors are ideal for ultra-fast particle analysis, with EDS acquisition speeds in excess of 120k particles per hour.
AZtecClean is a solution which utilises the power of AZtecFeature and Ultim Max EDS hardware to optimise and automate the technical cleanliness analysis. AZtecClean allows you to find, identify particles and report on particles to international standards, such as ISO16232 and VDA19.
This real-time video shows very high-speed acquisition quantification and classification of technical cleanliness sample.
AZtecClean allows you to analyse your sample in SEM in an automatic way. The basic approach used is to locate where a particle is, measure its morphology and composition, combine this information to classify it and repeat for all other particles. It then builds up a big picture of a large population of particles. An example is shown below:
Montaged image of the entire filter showing detected particles. Particles are coloured by their classification.
Classification totals and colour key for entire filter analysis run.
We will go into much more details in our upcoming tutorial ‘Technical Cleanliness Analysis with AZtecClean’. Please join us on Thursday 7th July 2022 – you can get to the registration page here.
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