February 26, 2009 – Axiom Analytical announced its fiber-optic coupled FPT-750 Near-IR Transmission Probe. The new probe shares many of the characteristics of the FPT-850 on-line process analytical probes, including the extreme robustness provided by the welded metal window sealing technique. However, the new probe also features reduced size and weight and thus is tailored to providing convenience and economy for chemical development and process modeling. 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, greatly enhancing sample flow between the windows. A second distinguishing characteristic of FPT Series probes is the fact that they do not use internal optical fibers. This has two significant performance benefits. First it eliminates performance variations which result when critical optical components are subjected to varying temperatures.
Second, it eliminates the fringing which results from fiber-to-fiber connections. Furthermore, a significant maintenance benefit results from the fact that the probe is not compromised by any damage that might occur to the optical fibers 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 high level of performance to chemical and process development applications in these industries. Since the FPT-750 optical design 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.