Abstract

Fire assaying, a technique that has been around for centuries, is still the most generally accepted method which is used to determine the purity of gold. In Indian jewellery industries (including big market players like Tanishq), the lead time for receiving the sample from the customer department and declaring the result (purity of gold) is very large which forces the company to outsource the testing activity, which increases the overall cost. One of the key processes in Fire assaying is the cupellation process. During the study some bottle neck areas were identified and this paper presents the solutions to overcome the same and increase the productivity. In the proposed method individual loading of cupels have been eliminated and bulk loading is introduced using bullion blocks. For this purpose, indigenous equipment multi-loader, an exclusive fork and base plate have been designed. All the modelling has been done using NX 5 CAD/CAM software. This will enable the operators to process 21 samples in one stroke and thus reducing the loading and unloading time considerably.

Keywords

• Fire Assaying
• Cupellation
• Multiloader

Co Author

Siddharth Porwal