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| GX Skills Employed |
| Industrial Design |
| Mechanical Design |
| Electronic Hardware Design |
| PCB Layout Design |
| Prototyping |
| Optical Design |
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| GX Design Engineers have played a
central role in the production of an award- winning
bench-top spectrometer, produced by Oxford Instruments.
The Twin-X Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Spectrometer was
given a Bronze Award for Industrial Design by the specialist
newsletter Instrument Business Outlook (IBO). These
awards were introduced in the interests of recognising
the commitment of different companies producing instruments
to executing what IBO describes as the delicate balance
of eye-catching design and functional enhancement in
producing products which are visually appealing. |
| The spectrometer combines two proven
detector technologies to enable one compact instrument
to deliver high performance. Each detector is tuned
for a specific group of elements on the periodic table,
and they are able to outperform pin diode detectors
on those elements with low atomic numbers such as sodium,
magnesium, aluminium, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine,
potassium and calcium. The pin detectors on the other
hand are used to focus on the analysis of complex metal
matrices, where they are highly sensitive to elements
with higher atomic numbers like chromium, manganese,
iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc. This enables
the instrument to be used to measure 80 different elements
from samples which can be solids, liquids, powders,
pastes, granules, films or filter papers. For example,
routine tests for the Twin-X include the detection of
sulphur levels in oil and monitoring standards of quality
and process control for consumer products. |
| For these specialist awards, limited
to analytical or life science instruments which reached
the market between August 2002 and July 2003, the standard
of industrial design is even more important than performance,
though GX’s contribution was vital to both these
qualities. The company carried out the industrial design
of the instrument enclosure, together with the membrane
key panel and the electronics for the interface. They
also designed the mechanical parts and the optical design
for the warning beacons for this advanced instrument. |
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