LECO Australia metallographic-science posts (Page 1 of 7)

If all you need for your mount is a uniform shape to hold your sample, Bakelite or epoxy would work just fine. It's simply a matter of finding the mounting material that works best with the sample material. But if you need a mounting material that lets you see the sample mounted within, there is no better choice than Lucite.

Elements Newsletter recently published an infographic of all of the metals mined from the earth in 2019, and the numbers were staggering. 3,248,814,334 tons of metal were mined, of which 3,040,000,000 tons were iron ore. Nearly 94% of all of the metal mined in 2019 was iron, and nearly that percent of the iron has been, in some way, touched by LECO.

In this era of incredible plug and play technology, a Video Measuring System or reticle disc for your microscope eyepiece feels like it should be enough to begin accurately measuring metallographic samples, but if you skip your calibration steps, your results could be wildly inaccurate.

When magnification was as simple as one eyepiece and one objective, finding your total magnification was as easy as multiplying the two values together. The addition of film brought a third value to the equation, but the result remained a static, concrete number.

And then along came the computer.

With a huge variety of video camera chips and monitor sizes and camera couplers and screen resolution, suddenly viewing something at 500X magnification became much more challenging. There was no way to take into account all of the permutations possible. For example, even if two systems were otherwise exactly the same, but one had a 23" monitor and the other had a 24" monitor, the magnification would be different.

It was time to replace the magnification focus with a different way of looking at things: the Field of View (F.O.V.)

LECO recently said farewell to our former Corporate Metallurgist, Dave Coulston. Anyone who worked with our metallographic experts in the past fifteen years undoubtedly got to experience his expertise. In honor of Dave's retirement, we welcomed him onto LECO's podcast: Measured Science.

Bakelite, Lucite, epoxy, or acrylic? Hot or cold? Compression or castable? With all of the options available for mounting materials, it can be difficult to know which one is the best option for your sample or why it even matters. However, your choice of mounting material is important, and it can affect the final quality of your prepared sample.

The LECO Analytical Applications Poster Competition (LA²PC) 2020-2021 recently wrapped up, showcasing 15 incredible posters highlighting the applications of LECO instruments in our users' work and research. A hearty congratulations goes to our winners: Karl Hornsby, Martin J. Taylor, Vasiliki Skoulou | University of Hull, Peter Hurst | Biorenewables Development Centre – BDC, and Simon Walker | Jesmond Engineering Limited. Their poster, "Pretreating lignocellulosic biomass wastes for the next generation of solid fuels" is a fantastic look into the search for new solid fuels.