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Adept Scientific (Letchworth, Herts) provides spectroscopy software to Protea (Crewe, Cheshire) as part of its innovative emissions monitoring and analysis process.

Discovering unexpected compounds in the stack emissions of a process plant requires a degree of detective work, supported by the best in infra-red spectrometers and the most powerful spectroscopic software.

The monitoring and control of industrial emissions has been high on the environmental agenda for almost 50 years and, since then, air quality in the UK has greatly improved.

Today, industrial plants have an ever-increasing barrage of legislation and regulation to adhere to with strict requirements regarding the nature and quantity of allowable stack emissions and tight timetables of monitoring and control to be met.

Even the best-maintained site can lose a sensor with little or no warning, meaning that the availability of a rapid back-up is critical. Protea specialises in process investigation and is expert in the use of monitoring techniques such as Fourier Transform infra-red (FT-IR) and mass spectrometry.

As well as these expert monitoring services Protea manufacturers portable analysers to its own design. Its ProtIR 204M portable FTIR instrument is designed specifically for stack emissions testing and process investigation and can be deployed rapidly on site should a monitoring system go offline.

With any sensor technology, the value of the information yielded depends on both the quality of the data collected and the power with which it is analysed. Protea uses GRAMS software from Thermo Scientific (San Jose, California), supplied by UK distributor Adept Scientific, to validate the spectra collected on the ProtIR 204M.

GRAMS is a premier spectroscopy suite which enables data to be visualised, processed and managed and is compatible with many different types of instrument. “It has a number of really nice features”, says Andy Toy, “which are useful for producing calibration spectra like the spectral maths facility and the way you can add and subtract spectra.”

Andy Toy clearly revels in the power. “As far as I know, we are the only Company that can do the things we do: we can work on any batch chemical and pharmaceutical plant, incineration plant or just about any other industrial site, with a quick response and long monitoring periods. With our ProtIR spectrometer and GRAMS software we can speciate out all the organics in the stream. Nobody else can do that.”

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.