Tescan has released its next-generation Tima, a dedicated solution for automated mineralogical analysis for industrial mineral processing and earth sciences. The new solution 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, Tima handles high-throughput, industrial mineral processing applications with minimal need for operator intervention. It automates mineral phase identification, measurement and textural data interpretation, then generates the required process mineralogy reports. It delivers reliable and reproducible quantitative data to improve processes.
For earth sciences, the new tool provides and easy-to-use, automated mineralogy solution that makes petrography and microanalysis faster and more efficient. It is not only capable of handling modal composition routines, but can also determine the composition of entire populations of grains, producing elemental maps of all detectable elements plus the coordinates of minerals of interest.
“The geosciences community now understands how automated mineralogy can help them ease their research,” said Marek Dosbaba from Tescan. “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 (EDS) detectors, each with their own digital pulse processor, increase throughput speed for sample processing. Tescan's high-sensitivity spectral summing algorithm assures accurate and reproducible quantification for low abundance elements. Tima adopts the ease-of-use principals of the firm's Essence graphical user interface (GUI) so new operators can quickly become proficient and 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.
