News | March 20, 2000

FT-IR Unit Is Designed for Rugged Environments

Source: Bruker Optics Inc.
The sight of a laboratory FT-IR machine being drenched in water cascading from an overhead pipe caught more than a few visitors to the Bruker Optics Inc. (Billerica, MA) Pittcon booth by surprise this week. The setup was Bruker's way of showing the robustness of its newly introduced Matrix FT-IR compact spectrometer for process monitoring.

Encased in a watertight housing and featuring permanently aligned optics, the 19-in. wide unit is designed to function in extremes of heat, cold, and moisture. The model features built-in and external multiplexer options and can monitor up to 16 reactions. It can be fitted with a range of different probes for determining analyte concentrations in liquids, emulsions, powders, and pellets. The main purpose of the unit is to monitor chemical reactions and the quality of intermediate and final products in blending, refining, and polymerizations. According to Bruker, the machine can operate at pressures greater than 20 bar and temperatures in excess of 200°C.

One accessory for Bruker's FT-IR machines is a focal-plane imaging system that permits simultaneous acquisition of 4096 data points resolving 64x64 pixels. The system covers the 10,000 to 900 cm-1 range. Chemical imaging of the sort provided by the unit is useful for samples having little visible contrast. Such samples are often encountered in cancer diagnostics and implant identification. Converting IR signals into images is an example of the data reduction capabilities Bruker is pursuing, Dan Klevisha, the company's vice president of sales and marketing, told Laboratory Network.

Other new Bruker Optics introductions include:

  • An external accessory for automated analysis of samples directly into micro titer plates. The product, HTS-XT, can analyze samples in transmission or diffuse reflection mode; its module can accommodate 96, 384, and 1536 well plates.

  • An optimized TG-FTIR system, the result of a collaboration between Bruker and Netzsch Instruments (Paoli, PA). Both components are controlled from an integrated software package that allows users to merge the two data streams into a single file for comparison and correlation of sample behavior.

  • Software that offers QA/QC workers a self-optimizing routine for generating the calibration model. The product is an enhancement of Bruker's Opus/Quant software for Windows NT.

Edited by Gordon Graff