Pressure from the automotive industry

As with so many other quality requirements, it is the automotive industry that has driven the development forward.

– The demands today are simply so high because everything in the automotive industry has to be more efficient, that is, compared to the fact that we have to have some much cleaner fuel engines, and everything becomes more fine mechanical. This means that, for example, if you assemble an engine and there are some particles on each part, then we know well that many small particles they become large, and that’s one of the reasons this standard has come, says Anders Hedeby Sørensen.

The laboratory itself Anmasi established in connection with construction of a new headquarters in Grindsted. Already at the design, space was made for the laboratory.

Finding even the smallest particles

Now equipment has been purchased for the laboratory, which is thus fully functional.

– We got equipment from Zeiss, where we bought a large microscope with which we can measure these standards. The purity analysis is done when we are in the sales process of a cleaning system, we take out an part, take it into the laboratory and clean it again with a special solvent in a specially designed system for particulate analysis. The liquid in that chamber is emitted through a special 0.65 micron biological membrane filter, which they also use in laboratories, explains Anders Hedeby Sørensen.

– Then we dry the membrane filter in a laboratory oven, and then we go into a delicate weight and weigh the filter before and after cleaning with the solvent. This allows us to see how many milligrams of contaminants are on the part. Once we have done that, we go over to our microscope, put in the membrane filter and run an analysis. That analysis works by identifying the size of the particles down to 5 microns. Then we identify what materials are, whether it is fibers, metal particles or other materials. We do this by the microscope having a built-in light. As we run the tests, we glow down on the particles and the light causes the metal to glare, after which we run an analysis without light to identify the other particles. Afterwards, the microscope automatically generates a report, according to the standard we have chosen, he continues.

We must follow the customers

Anders Hedeby Sørensen explains that this equipment is usually found only at larger companies with their own quality laboratory.

– I’m pretty sure we’re the first in our Scandinavian industry to have this, and it’s an investment we made to make it better than our competitors and be able to keep up with our customers. For example, one of our large customers has had that equipment for many years, and they have demanded that the cleaning systems we provide meet these requirements. So we have to be on the same level as our big customers, says Anders Hedeby Sørensen.

– But besides that, we also use the equipment for customers who have a small machine factory, where we can offer to do the analysis and document that their cleaning systems are washing according to the requirements of their customers, he concludes.