Out of the many new products exhibited at Pittcon this year, IBO has selected three products that it believes excel in innovation, technical advancement and prospects for commercial success. These three products are notable for their potential to evolve the markets for their respective techniques due to increases in performance parameters, and the development of new applications and expansion of the end-user base. The products are presented in order of achievement.

LECO Citius LC-HRT

The winner of this year’s IBO Product of the Show for Pittcon is LECO’s Citius LC-HRT, which is an LC-TOF MS. This is not the first time in recent memory that LECO has earned an IBO award for one of its new MS products, having had its TruTOF HT GC-TOF named Product of the Show at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Convention in 2007 (see IBO 6/15/07). The Citius uses an innovative new Folded Flight Path (FFP), which allows for effective flight path lengths of 1.25 m, 20 m and 40 m, while limiting the size of the instrument to a compact floor-standing package. More important, this completely new design is able to maintain a resolution of up to 100,000 FWHM while scanning at up to 100 spectra per second and close to five orders of dynamic range. Such performance exceeds all other LC-TOF MS instruments, with more than twice the speed and greater than four times the resolution of any other model. While it might be expected that other LC-TOF MS instruments, which are between 15% and 40% lower in price, would not match the performance of the Citius, few Q-TOF LC/MS systems come close in terms of acquisition speed or resolution. The Citius is available with ESI, APCI and DESI ionization sources, and is being targeted at applications such as high-throughput metabolomics screening, which will pit it against competitors’ high-end LC/MS systems such as Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Exactive Orbitrap LC/MS and Bruker’s maXis Q-TOF MS. The Citius is now selling without an LC included, starting at $395,000, and first deliveries are expected by September.

Waters UPSFC

Waters introduced the ACQUITY UPSFC supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) system, the first SFC system designed for use with sub-2 µm particle technology at pressures up to 6,000 psi. Intended for chiral and achiral separations, which are traditional SFC applications, the system can also serve as an alternative to normal-phase HPLC. The UPSFC system employs Waters’s Viridis 1.7 µm columns.

Built from the ground up, the ACQUITY UPSFC is designed to be a robust and reliable analytical SFC system. System operation is similar to HPLC, creating a familiar experience for end-users and increasing ease of use.

The combination of SFC and Waters’s ACQUITY technology seeks to provide a lower cost of analysis due to shorter run times and reduced solvent usage. Supercritical fluids provide low viscosity and high solute diffusivity relative to HPLC solvents, resulting in faster analysis times, lower backpressure, shorter re-equilibration times and higher throughput, according to Waters.

SFC uses carbon dioxide as the primary mobile phase. Commercial grade carbon dioxide is inexpensive compared with the cost of HPLC solvents such as acetonitrile. In addition, carbon dioxide costs nothing to dispose of and is nontoxic.

The system is compatible with Waters’s Empower HPLC software, MassLynx MS software, and UV and mass detectors. The AQCUITY UPSFC system is currently installed at several beta-sites and is expected to start shipping in the third quarter. Equipped with a PDA detector, the system is listed for the price of $120,000.

Mettler-Toledo Flash DSC 1

Mettler-Toledo’s Flash Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) 1 constitutes a revolution in thermal analysis measurement. Compared with conventional DSCs, which typically make use of relatively macroscopic quantities of sample on the order of a few milligrams, the Flash DSC 1 is designed to analyze samples from a few micrograms down to 10 ng.

One obvious difference between this system and a conventional DSC is the integration of a microscope, which allows researchers to load the small sample onto the sensor. The advantage of using small samples is that a relatively modest amount of energy applied to a sample with a tiny mass can cause a rapid alteration in temperature. Furthermore, in conventional DSC, the mass of the crucible that holds the sample also contributes to the total heat capacity of the system, increasing the required energy. Similarly, the thermal conductivity of the crucible places other limitations on how rapidly the sample can be heated and cooled.

In the Flash DSC 1, the sample is directly applied to the sensor. The active portion of the sensor is a thin membrane composed of silicon nitride and silicon dioxide coated with aluminum for greater thermal conductivity. The structure is just 2 µm thick, so it contributes little additional heat capacity. The sensor is integrated into a ceramic plate with the heating system and the array of thermocouples that measure the heat flow.

Since the sample/sensor system is orders of magnitude lighter than in conventional systems, the Flash DSC 1 can achieve heating rates that are orders of magnitude greater—up to 40,000 K per second—and cooling rates of up to 4,000 K per second. These processes are of interest to R&D labs in both polymers and pharmaceuticals, and also in the optimization of process control.

Although the sensors cannot be reused with a completely different sample, the test is nondestructive, so the sensor chips can be stored for reanalysis of the same sample under different conditions. The Flash DSC 1 began shipping at the end of 2010 at a price of about $95,000.