Latest News and Application Notes

Once more expensive than gold, aluminum has not lost its value over the years, only its price tag. Thanks to revolutionary methods of production largely developed in the late 1800s, the price of aluminum dropped from $34 an ounce in 1852 ($1,276 in 2022 dollars) to just $0.09 an ounce today. As a low-density, high-strength, corrosion-resistant metal, aluminum's usefulness has led to incredible consumption in many industries from transportation to packaging.

Clean, safe water is a cornerstone of life itself, and the ability to properly process and treat wastewater is a key component in environmental preservation. As such, water treatment plants such as Veritas S. p. A (Veneziana Energia Risorse Idriche Territorio Ambiente e Servizi) are a critical part of water infrastructure, and the analytical methods they use are a critical part of water treatment.

Even the best-trained experts can only move as fast as their equipment will allow, and as helium prices increase and supplies drop, the fast spectral acquisition speeds of GC-TOFMS instruments stand ready to reap the benefits of fast GC separations afforded by utilizing hydrogen carrier gas.

While the advantages of helium as a carrier gas for mass spectrometers have long been known, it is a limited natural resource. On the other hand, hydrogen gas generators can be installed in any lab for a constant supply and, conveniently, increased chromatographic speeds.

LECO is saddened to announce the passing of our former president, Robert J. Warren, 88, of St. Joseph, Michigan . He passed away peacefully on April 23, 2022, at home, surrounded by family and friends.

Year after year, the popularity of juice continues to rise. As consumers become more health- and environmentally-conscious, juice has risen to the forefront as a sustainable, vegan, and nutritious beverage option. It certainly doesn't hurt that with the pandemic, people have shifted to entertaining at home and making their own mixed drinks with juices as mixers. But how does juice actually hold up to nutritional demands?

LECO's Separation Science division has been seeing a lot of growth, and with that growth grew a new Global Application and Development Director! Nick Jones sat down with Measured Science host Andrew Storey to discuss LECO's GC-MS technology and why Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (TOFMS) is the future.

LECO is heading back to the show floor!

Are you attending the Cast Expo in Columbus, Ohio, from April 23 to April 26? Stop by Booth #2016 to meet our instrument experts and get answers to your metallographic questions!

Heading to AIST in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from May 16 to May 19, instead? LECO will be at Booth #505!

Traditional thermogravimetric analyses such as loss-on-drying or loss-on-ignition techniques are long processes with many manual steps as samples are measured and transferred and re-measured to determine the loss. Every touch increases labor requirements and the chance for operator error. But there's a better way.

Petroleum products are used the world over, and they all start with crude oil refinement. In distilling, cracking, and reforming the crude oil into petroleum products, many analytical instruments and tests are needed to monitor the process and maintain the quality demanded by consumers and regulations.

Most iron products these days are improved with the addition of ferroalloys, or iron alloys containing high levels of other primary elements. Ferroalloys are everywhere from cast iron to stainless steel. These extra elements help strengthen the metal by adding their own characteristics: silicon is used to deoxidize steel, manganese mitigates harmful effects of sulfur, and chromium increases corrosion resistance, to name just a few. But adding to iron is not without risk; if unwanted elements are part of the ferroalloy, they can weaken the resulting products.