Axiom Analytical has announced the launch of its fibre-optic-coupled FPT-750 near-infrared transmission probe.
The probe shares many of the characteristics of the company's FPT-850 on-line process analytical probes, including the robustness provided by the company's welded metal window sealing technique.
The probe also features reduced size and weight and is tailored to providing convenience and economy for chemical development and process modelling.
In common with the FPT-850, the FPT-750 employs a single pass through the sample gap.
This provides two important advantages compared to double-pass 'transflectance' probes.
First, it eliminates the possibility of stray-light offset caused by backscatter from either the sample or the probe windows.
Second, it provides twice the window separation for a given optical pathlength, enhancing sample flow between the windows.
The FPT series probes do not use internal optical fibres.
This has two performance benefits.
First, it eliminates performance variations that result when critical optical components are subjected to varying temperatures.
Second, it eliminates the fringing that results from fibre-to-fibre connections.
Furthermore, a maintenance benefit results from the fact that the probe is not compromised by any damage that might occur to the optical fibres connecting it to the spectrometer.
The FPT-850 is widely used for on-line NIR and UV-visible process analysis in the chemical, petroleum, and pharmaceutical industries.
The FPT-750 brings the same level of performance to chemical and process-development applications in these industries.
Since the FPT-750 optical design is essentially identical to that of the FPT-850, applications and process models developed in the laboratory using the 750 can be deployed directly on-line using the 850.
