Research costs, comparison with commercial

From the Second World War through the 1980s there was little research done on protein plastics. However, such research is experiencing a resurgence. Environmental concerns associated with petrochemical plastics have led to industrial and commercial interest in environmentally friendly alternatives. These materials display comparable properties to petrochemical plastics. This, in combination with the increasing environmental concern of consumers, has led these materials to gain some acceptance despite their high cost in comparison with established synthetic materials." ... 

Perhaps the most marked difference between flame AAS and flame AFS is the fact that, in the latter technique, the signal increases with the useful source intensity. Source intensity (for a constant line profile) has no effect in AAS, because absorbance is a ratio (see Chapter 1). For this reason, over almost three decades a great deal of research effort has gone into trying to produce more intense and stable sources for use in AFS. For some elements, very low detection limits have been obtained using lasers as excitation sources. A comparison of detection limits by AFS using diverse sources may be found in the useful critical and comprehensive review of AFS by Omenetto and Winefordner.7 Such sources have found very limited application in routine environmental analysis, primarily because of cost and lack of standard commercially available instrumentation they will not be considered further here. 

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