Toulouse,: Alpha MOS, world leader in electronic nose and tongue technology for industrial applications, introduces its latest fast Gas Chromatography electronic nose HERACLES bundled with additional AroChemBase module for chemical and sensory characterization.

HERACLES combines unique technical features that make it not only a powerful fast gas chromatography instrument but also an unsurpassed electronic nose.

The instrument takes advantage of its embedded thermo-regulated trap for sample preconcentration before injection to reach high sensitivity of analysis even for highly volatile compounds.

With two columns of different polarities in parallel, coupled to two Flame Ionization Detectors (FID), this dual GC delivers comprehensive information about the chemical compounds through 2 chromatograms produced simultaneous.

Using high temperature ramp rates, compounds separation is achieved in seconds or a few minutes, with no compromise on resolution.

Compatible with a variety of sample extraction devices, the instrument offers a great selectivity enabling the analysis of complex matrices while reducing the need for sample preparation.

The complete HERACLES system is fully controlled with the AlphaSoft software, which simplifies the path from samples to results. In addition to automating sample runs and programming analytical parameters, the software guides users to optimize method setup and efficiently get reliable results.

AlphaSoft features all gas chromatography functionalities to make chromatograms handling and integration easy and successful. As an electronic nose software, it additionally includes powerful chemometrics data processing making the interpretation and reading of huge amounts of chemical and sensory data clear and easy to understand. These tools consist of quality control cards for assessing the sensory quality of new batches, shelf life graphs showing odor evolution over time, odor maps comparing the olfactory fingerprint of various products, quantitative models for quantifying a concentration or sensory descriptors intensity.

Advanced odor analysis module

When combined with AroChemBase, HERACLES is a powerful system to help identify the chemical compounds and characterize the odor-related compounds. Fully integrated in the HERACLES monitoring software (AlphaSoft), AroChemBase software

module can be operated directly from the chromatograms acquisition interface, without the need to run several software systems. For a selected peak, it proposes a list of possible molecules based on Kovats index matching, and ranked by relevance index.

The module also offers advanced search capabilities on one or multiple criteria to finetune the identification according to retention index, formula, chemical composition, area of application or sensory descriptor.

For a sample, the user can thus display all compounds potentially present, check the presence of a compound of interest, search all compounds from a chemical family or focus the search based on defined sensory attributes or a product name in the

literature.

Initially delivered with more than 44,000 compounds, among which about 2,000 with sensory attributes, this comprehensive database can be enriched at any moment with user data.

AlphaSoft and AroChemBase are available in 7 languages: French, English, Japanese,Chinese, Korean, Spanish and German.

Enhanced application capabilities The fast-cycling HERACLES-AroChemBase system is well suited for food quality and

safety testing and food/flavor/fragrance/packaging analyses such as aroma profiling, chemical characterization, sensory benchmarking of competitors product or gold standard, product re-formulation or retro-engineering, off-odor identification (cause of odor-related defect), consumer claim, identification and characterization of changes during shelf life.

About Alpha MOS

Founded in 1993 by Jean-Christophe MIFSUD, Alpha MOS (www.alpha-mos.com), is a world leader in the manufacture of electronic nose, electronic tongue and visual analyzer for industrial purposes with more than 1,700 instruments sold in the world. Headquartered in Japan, China and the United States, the company Alpha MOS achieved a consolidated turnover for the year 2011-2012 of €8.6 million.