CSIRO takes Malvern Mastersizer out to sea

Work by the CSIRO Minerals team in Australia to analyze oil rig wastewaters has demonstrated the robustness of Malvern’s Mastersizer design, and the breadth of applications for which this family of particle size analyzers can be used.

The work was carried out on a platform 130 km out at sea, using a Mastersizer which had been transported directly to the site. Despite the rigours of transportation, alignment of the unit had barely changed and it was ready for use in a matter of minutes.

The Mastersizer was used to perform particle analysis on waste waters to help identify the most effective treatment before disposal. Analysis had to be conducted on site as the samples contained oil droplets that coalesced or ‘creamed out’ within minutes – which would change the nature of the sample irreversibly.

In a very different environment, the CSIRO Minerals’ team transported the Mastersizer to an alumina refinery to analyze highly caustic liquor samples. As the caustic nature of the samples would have dissolved the standard glass windows used by the Mastersizer, the team equipped the unit with custom-made sapphire windows cut from single crystals of synthetic sapphire. The windows were polished to optical flatness and then coated with an anti-reflective material to reduce back-reflection of the laser beam, which in turn enabled the unit to deliver reliable, accurate results on a very difficult sample.

Back at the lab, CSIRO Minerals also has a ‘workhorse’ Mastersizer 2000 which is used to measure around 200 samples per week. The Mastersizer 2000 is a flexible, fully automated, SOP-driven laser diffraction particle size analyzer for the measurement of wet and dry samples containing particles in the size range 0.02 to 2000 microns.

Method commonality between the Malvern systems and the reproducibility of results allows the CSIRO team to test in the field as well as in the lab, providing the flexibly to confidently analyze sample streams that cannot be transported to the laboratory, or request samples for further detailed analysis.