From the September 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


 


6. Housing test
This part of the process gets to the heart of what a tube manufacturer’s customers care about — the focal spot of the radiation source that they’re buying. This process, which is where the rubber meets the road for X-ray tubes, quantifies levels of output.

The focal spot sizes are measured to make certain they are within the industry tolerances and the final assembly is checked for any stray radiation leakage to assure X-ray output is only from the desired window.

“We test our products on actual customer generators and scanners to ensure optimal performance in the field,” says Laura Hafner, senior director of global sales and marketing for Dunlee.

7. Finish-off
This part may seem to be only cosmetic, and on some level it is. Tubes are painted to match the shade of the OEM machines. But tubes also have to be labeled as part of regulatory compliance, with different countries having different requirements.

For Dunlee, the entire process, from degassing and cleaning to being able to ship, generally takes four to five days to many weeks, depending on the tube type.

Jonaitis, of Varian, notes that part preparation can take one month, while the rest of the process takes about two weeks.

For both companies, materials and parts make up the majority of the cost of the tube, followed by overhead and then labor, even though at Dunlee, 90 percent of the manufacturing is done by hand, while the remaining 10 percent is robotic, with robots mainly used during the Housing Test step.

For Varian, probably 70 percent of the original labor content has been replaced by automation. Jonaitis says this keeps the company competitive on cost and allows them to “tune a process to an optimum point and reproduce that point consistently.”

September 2014 Magazine

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