An Irish company has won two international awards for a new device that can analyse anything from asphalt to toothpaste, writes Dick Ahlstrom
For those who hate the watery stuff at the top of a bottle of ketchup, help is at hand. An Irish company has developed an analytical system that can explain how it forms.
The same device can also monitor the content of asphalt for road building, measure the characteristics of toothpaste and whether the top or bottom of a bottle of medicine contains more drug. It can even measure the changes taking place in ripening cheese.
The device, an ultrasonic spectrometer, uses sound waves that can study the content of liquid and semisolid materials and provide information about them. It interprets the speed and energy levels of sound waves as they pass through a substance and from this details about the substance emerge.
The company is Ultrasonic Scientific Ltd based at the Guinness Enterprise and Technology Centre in Dublin. It was established in 1999 and employs 15 people, nine of them in research and development. "We are a technology company," explains Ms Breda O'Driscoll, the firm's managing director. "It is very much an R&D and manufacturing company. We develop manufacture and sell ultrasonic instruments in the analytical instrumentation market."
The company is based here and holds its own patents but the initiating research began abroad. "The original research work was in the Soviet Union then in the Max Planck Institute in Germany," she explains. "The inventor of the technology is Dr Vitaly Buckin."
He moved to Ireland and a company was established to develop and commercialise the technology. The company launched the ultrasonic spectrometer last March and new products are under development, she says.
The technique is "completely non-invasive and non-destructive", states the company's product manager, Dr Cormac Smyth. It can be used to analyse virtually any liquid or semi-liquid substance, for example foodstuffs such as milk, butter or cheese, liquid pharmaceutical products and even asphalt.
It is particularly useful for studying the point where emulsions or other mixtures separate, coagulate or destabilise, says Smyth. In the example above, it can be used to continuously monitor the separation of ketchup as that nasty juice forms.
Pharmaceutical companies must ensure that the drugs in liquid preparations do not settle out, leaving the top half of a bottle with insufficient drug and the bottom with too much. "Our system can be used to analyse that to show how much drug it contains," says Smyth.
The device uses sound waves in the megahertz frequency range. "We measure two different parameters, the speed of sound as it passes through a substance and sound attenuation or the loss of energy of the sound wave," Smyth explains.
"Every single compound has its own speed of sound," and will transmit and absorb sound waves in a characteristic way. "We look at the molecular level. The more rigid the molecule the faster sound will travel."
It analyses at from one to eight frequencies at a time, typically using just one millilitre of material. A new version under development will sample down to just 30 millionths of a litre but larger samples can also be analysed, for example a ripening block of cheese.
A typical use would be to study why a product sometimes separates, for example sun cream or similar emulsions. "A customer might ask, can you please tell us why this happens," says Smyth. The device can be used to detect destabilisation under controlled conditions to help understand why this happens.
The device has picked up two international awards since its launch. The US based R&D magazine last month included it in its 40th annual top 100 new technology products for 2002. Products are selected on an international basis for this competition.
In March it took the silver medal for new analytical products at Pittcon the 53rd annual Pittsburgh Conference and Exhibition. This too is an international competition open to very large companies.
