New Stand-Alone Instrument Designed for Processing Environments
by Mary Ellen Kuhn
Buchi Corp. (Booth 5577), a Switzerland-based company with U.S. headquarters in New Castle, Del., has unveiled its NIR Master, the first stand-alone FT-NIR spectrometer specifically designed to handle routine quality control work in harsh environments. Buchi outlined the benefits of NIR Master and two other pieces of analytical equipment at a press conference in McCormick Place on Monday, July 19.
NIR Master provides food companies with the capability of inline, multi-parameter analysis. It includes a built-in PC as well as ready-to-use calibrations for the food, feed, dairy, meat, and bakery industries. Its internal laser reference eliminates the need for frequent, expensive instrument standardizations, saving users time and money. NIR Master is available in both food-grade polymer and stainless steel housings.
Buchi is also showcasing its new Nano Spray Dryer B-90, a laboratory-scale spray dryer capable of particle generation in the nanometer range, at the Food Expo this year. The B-90, a companion product to Buchi’s Mini Spray Dryer is designed to evaluate drying during the early stages of product development in the pharmaceutical, food, advanced materials, and nanotechnology industries for aqueous or solvent-based formulations. Microencapsulation of flavorants is an example of one potentially valuable food industry application.
Also new from Buchi this year is the SpeedDigester K-439, which the company says is the first infrared digestion system in the marketplace created to combine both a high level of automation and precise temperature control, making it a valuable tool in the process of protein analysis by Kjeldahl method. It can be used with 200 ml sample tubes for standard Kjeldahl methods as well as 500 ml sample tubes for the larger volumes of environmental samples.
Buchi, which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its U.S. operation, also outlined its venture into the e-commerce arena using an Amazon platform at the press conference. The new e-commerce application is geared toward providing customers in the United States and Canada with an easy option for ordering some of the company’s most commonly used parts and most popular accessories. Introduced in March, the platform has been well received, and the company expects to expand it in the months ahead. “I think by the end of the year, it will be very well established,” said Marketing Director Michael Stern.