Pittcon Follow-Up:Portable Hand Held FTIRs Really Exist!

Pittcon Follow-Up: Portable Hand Held FTIRs Really Exist!

In my last post I was bemoaning the head cold I had while trying to navigate the grand halls of Pittcon. The head cold turned into a sinus infection, but thanks to the modern miracle of antibiotics I am now back in writing form.

One of the neatest things I saw at the Pittsburgh Conference in Chicago (it really sounds like the meeting planners don't know their geography) were hand held FTIRs. These are portable FTIR systems that are light enough to be held in one hand, are battery powered, and have enough on-board computing power to allow you to take spectra, identify unknowns, perform quantitative analyses, and diagnose instrument problems. These systems are a true miracle to me. I am old enough to have worked with some of the first commercial FTIR systems built in the 1970s. These were huge machines that weighed hundreds of pounds, were very sensitive to vibration, and were complex to run. Today we have FTIR systems that are rugged enough to be taken out into the field, weigh only several pounds, and can be operated by anyone with a little bit of training. I will review one instrument here, and another in a few days.

The first system I saw at Pittcon is made by Ahura Scientific of Wilmington, MA. It is called the TruDefender FT, although that moniker sounds like it could also be applied to a super hero. The system is 7.8" x 4.4" x 2.1 and weighs under 3 pounds. It uses a diamond ATR sensing head and can run on batteries for more than two hours. The spectrometer scans from 4000 to 650 cm-1, which indicates to me it probably has a ZnSe beamsplitter, and is capable of 4 cm-1 resolution. The unit seems to be designed for hazardous materials and homeland security applications. The area around a hazardous waste spill or bio-terrorism event is called the "hot zone". Ahura says their instrument is small enough and rugged enough to be taken right into the hot zone to examine the suspect material in-situ. There is no need to carry the material out of the hot zone to the instrument risking further contamination and wasting precious time.

Ahura Scientific claims their software can identify compounds from their infrared spectrum and provides, " definitive results that don’t require user interpretation or judgment" (this quote is from their website). I approached the people at the Ahura booth at Pittcon to ask them to explain how their identification software system works. They said "it's a trade secret" which I did not find helpful. More information on the TruDefender FT can be found here
http://www.ahurascientific.com/chemical-explosives-id/products/trudefenderft/index.php# .