A new high-resolution spectrometer takes centre stage, aiming to move ultrasonic technology from hospitals and submarines into the pharmaceutical laboratory
The new instrument, the HR-US 10, will be exhibited for the first time in Europe and offers advanced analytical capabilities for a broad range of applications, including chemistry, biotechnology, polymers, food science, pharmaceutical science, medicine, and environmental control.
The technology behind the instrument is based on the measurement of the velocity and attenuation of high frequency acoustic waves (above 20kHz), propagating through the sample allowing fast, non-destructive analysis.
Ultrasonic waves can travel through opaque systems, making the technique equally applicable to optically transparent and non-transparent samples. The user-friendly new HR-US 101 spectrometer combines record precision across a broad measuring range with a wide variety of measuring regimes (kinetics, temperature ramp, automatic titration, flow-through, multi-frequency), on small samples. According to Danny Pattyn, marketing and sales director at Ultrasonic Scientific, "although ultrasonic technology is well known for its applications in medical ultrasound and underwater sonar, the use of ultrasonics for measuring the physical properties of substances has been held back by inadequate instrumentation.
The world market for instruments that measure properties such as viscosity, particle size, phase transitions etc is worth between €1 billion and €1.5 billion - so the market opportunities for our new high resolution instrument are huge".
Pattyn comments, "initially, there are applications in the pharmaceutical industry, such as the study of biopolymers and biocolloids, that we believe will be of interest to Analytica attendees involved in this sector.
Studies that we have conducted on conformational changes of polymers, ligand binding, and gel formation have produced data that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with current methods - and very quickly." Ultrasonic Scientific is on stand C1.429 at Analytica.
