Sizing up the store cupboard

Last week I swapped a heat wave in the UK for a decidedly wet East Coast of the US, to do some Mastersizer 3000 training for some of Malvern’s account managers, application specialists and technical specialists at two of our US offices: Columbia, MD, and Westborough, MA. With the launch under way, the teams were interested in the detailed applications capabilities of the new system. So,  accompanied by the first set of customer samples for measurement on the system, the Malvern team gathered to test its performance.

Do you want cream with that?

As part of the training, we measured most of the contents of the Malvern kitchen! This included polydisperse samples such as coffee, along with more challenging fragile samples such as sweetener and coffee creamer.

For the Westborough training, we were in the applications lab where there was a variety of samples to measure, as well as the usual kitchen supplies. This allowed us to show the expanded applications capability of the system for samples such as soils and sediments and fine metal powders.

The perfect cuppa?

..is something I missed in the US, given that the Americans prefer to throw their tea in the sea!  However, as you can see below, we did trial a new sample beaker for the Hydro EV unit. Perhaps the ideal brew is close at hand!

Mugshot of the Hydro EV Dispersion Unit

Back to considering the Mastersizer 3000, however, it is clear that it is everybody’s cup of tea! Feedback on the operation of the system was excellent. And even though our US team doesn’t normally sell manual dispersion units, everybody liked the Hydro EV, especially the addition of a tank light.

And to finish the tour of the kitchen, we completed the week with a demonstration of the system to a customer measuring coffee samples. Here, the speed of measurement of the Aero S, and the wide dynamic range of the Mastersizer 3000 were clear advantages.

It was good to see how the benefits we’ve all grow to love about the new Mastersizer 3000 system do translate into real applications benefits for our customers.