Instrumental footprint

Multivariate optical elements provide a number of advantages over other types of spectrometers the cost of creating the filters is low, and the design of the spectrophotometer is simple there is no moving part, thus reducing the need for instrument maintenance, and the instrument footprint is limited, with devices that can be reduced to hold in the hand. 

Price of instrument Footprint and weight Power consump- tion, air condition load Qualification of personnel Mainte- nance... 

Equipment and Economics A veiy large electrodialysis plant would produce 500 /s of desalted water. A rather typical plant was built in 1993 to process 4700 mVday (54.4 /s). Capital costs for this plant, running on low-salinity brackish feed were 1,210,000 for all the process equipment, including pumps, membranes, instrumentation, and so on. Building and site preparation cost an additional 600,000. The building footprint is 300 itt. For plants above a threshold level of about 40 m Vday, process-equipment costs usually scale at around the 0.7 power, not too different from other process eqiiip-ment. On this basis, process equipment (excluding the ouilding) for a 2000 mVday plant would have a 1993 predicted cost of 665,000. 

UV/VIS absorption spectroscopy, pioneered by Beckman (1941), is one of the oldest and most widely used instrumental techniques, despite being regarded by some analysts as obsolete. Recently there has been a renaissance in UV spectroscopy with many new techniques, instruments and data processing methods [8]. Modem highest specification UV/VIS absorption and fluores-cence/phosphorescence spectrometer instruments extend their wavelength region from the far UV (175 nm) into the NIR region (1100 nm). Small footprint UV/VIS spectrometers (200-1100 nm) are now available. Paul [9] has traced the history of UV/VIS instrumental developments. 

Safety mnst be the first consideration of any process analytical installation. Electrical and weather enclosures and safe instrnment-process interfaces are expected for any process spectroscopy installation. The presence of a powerfnl laser, however, is nniqne to process Raman instruments and mnst be addressed due to its potential to injnre someone. Eye and skin injnries are the most common resnlts of improper laser exposure. Fortunately, being safe also is easy. Becanse so many people have seen pictnres of large industrial cutting lasers in operation, this is often what operations personnel erroneonsly first envision when a laser installation is discnssed. However, modem instmments nse small footprint, comparatively low power lasers, safely isolated in a variety of enclosures and armed with various interlocks to prevent accidental exposnre to the beam. 

The choice of a filler depends on the number of bottle sizes being considered for use on it. For example, if 3 1 PET bottles are to be filled, a 126 mm pitch between filling valves is required. If only small bottles up to 500 ml are to be filled, then a 70 mm pitch will suffice. This has a direct effect on the size of the filler and its footprint on the factory floor. Unless the filler bowl level is kept within tightly controlled limits, pressure head variations will affect the rate of flow into containers. Systems such as that shown in Figure 7.15 need to be employed. Wherever possible there should be minimal contact between any instrumentation and the product. Conventional float valves should be avoided and simple capacitance probes, which are easily cleanable but small and very effective, should be used. It is not uncommon in older fillers to only have one float valve. This often gives rise to filler bowl flooding, which may lead to inconsistent fill level and poor counter-pressurisation of the container pre-filling. 

Like the P54, the Nu Plasma is a forward geometry double-focusing mass spectrometer with double dispersion, but it has the standard C configuration and defines a smaller footprint (Fig. 8.2). The instrument has a source that is similar to... 

The instrument needed to perform automated preparative chromatography (which will hereafter be referred to as autoprep) in the desired format is based upon a standard high-pressure binary gradient instrument. The most important feature of the instrument for our particular requirements was the ability to operate from the microtitre plate sample format. This is important for combinatorially derived samples as it appears to be the standard format. It also becomes the most sensible arrangement for collecting large numbers of fractions within a reasonable size collection tray footprint . 

Current efforts have focused on even higher well densities and smaller assay volumes vide supra). Assay formats such as 1536 are gaining more acceptance in the uHTS arena initial promising results have been reported in 1-10 pi assay volumes. High-density 1536-well plates can be used to screen 16 times the number of compounds as the standard 96-well plate in the same convenient footprint. As interest is generated in this format, instrument manufacturers will provide the new technologies required to bring 1536-well plates to the level where 96-well formats are today. 

The instrument development cycle that began with a microscope accessory for an FT-IR spectrometer turned full circle with the production of a miniature interferometer accessory (the lUuminatIR ) for a research microscope. This latter development opened IMS to professional microscopists by adding a new, chemically selective dimension. Another small footprint-dedicated portable IMS used a diamond internal reflection element (IRE) to analyze solids or liquids on location. 

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