History - The Bruker Advantage

Bruker Elemental, Handheld XRF, can trace its history back to the early 1980s and the US National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. It was there that a team of scientists from United Nuclear Inc and the US Department of Energy pioneered the early breakthroughs in portable XRF. That led to the formation of Scitec, the company that would later become Bruker Elemental.

A lot has changed since those early days. A series of innovations has made handheld XRF technology an indispensable tool in fields as diverse as PMI (Positive Material Identification), art conservation, scrap sorting, petrochemical industries and the NASA space exploration program. S1 TURBOSD is the latest in a long line of innovations, representing the first portable XRF analyzer to incorporate Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) technology. During this development Bruker Elemental has produced thousands of handheld XRF instruments many of which were sold through a major OEM relationship.

 

History

     
1982 Map 1  
     
1982 Scitec Incorporated  
     
1994 Map 4  
     
1998 C-Thru acquires Scitec  
     
1999 Keymaster Technologies acquires C-Thru  
     
2001 TRACER 1  
     
2001 Keymaster introduces the first tube-based portable XRF  
     
2002 NASA Vacuum Instrument  
     
2002 Keymaster/NASA introduces first light element portable XRF  
     
2002 OEM Product, Version 2  
     
2005 TRACER III-V  
     
2006 OEM Product, Version 4  
     
2006 Bruker AXS acquires Keymaster Technologies  
     
2006 S1 TRACER  
     
2008 Bruker AXS Handheld introduces first SDD-based XRF, S1 TURBOSD  
     
2009 S1 SORTER  

For more information on the technology behind Handheld XRF, download the PDF file The Basics of Handheld XRF.