Is the material you ordered the material you are getting to your fab shop?

A quality control technician checks the alloy content of incoming steel with a handheld material analyzer. Evident/Olympus Scientific Solutions

Almost all of articles in The FABRICATOR, in its sister publication, and on TheFabricator.com focus on activities that change sheet metal into parts that people are willing to pay for. Not much time is spent on the actual material, but maybe it should be. In the end, a customer is only going to be satisfied if the final fabricated part is made of the specified metal.

Visually identifying low-alloy steels like molybdenum or high-alloy steels like stainless might be easy for some in the industry, but that’s hardly something to base a quality assurance program on. Demanding customers won’t tolerate mistakes, especially if they are simple enough to address. What are most shops doing to verify the alloy content of materials entering their delivery doors? Is it something that these shops really want to leave up to their service centers to stay on top of?

Material verification becomes even more important for shops working with critical industry segments like aerospace or power generation, which involve complex work and the high quality expectations Shops wanting to pursue relationships in these highly demanding, but sometimes lucrative, manufacturing segments need to bolster their quality programs, verify materials, and provide proof to these customers.

For shops interested in expanding their quality control of incoming materials, Evident/Olympus Scientific Solutions has published a new white paper, “Alloy Verification in Metal Fabrication: From Handheld to In-Line XRF Analysis.” The whitepaper covers the use of X-ray fluorescence (XRF), a nondestructive elemental analysis technique.

XRF technology can help shops bolster their quality assurance and quality control efforts with a nominal investment. For ease of use, XRF is available in rugged, hand-held analyzers that provide alloy grades in seconds while withstanding the dust and moisture in industrial environments.

For companies involved in high-volume production, this XRF technology can be incorporated into in-line analyzers to keep up with the demands of a robust manufacturing environment.

For more information on this technology, download the white paper here.