What is analytical instrumentation?
Analytical instrumentation is present in many industrial sectors, from the manufacturing of petroleum products, power generation, steelmaking, mining, pulp and paper, to the pharmaceutical and food industries.
In all applications, process control is fundamental to generate more competitive end products, by optimizing and reducing the variability in their manufacture. The importance of this control also extends to the areas of utilities, environment, and safety, to optimize equipment efficiency, monitor environmental conditions, optimize the handling and treatment of effluents, and to maintain the safety of men and equipments.
It is instrumentation that will provide the data to make this control possible, through human intervention or even automatically. Almost any physical-chemical property of an element or a substance can be used as the basis for determining an instrumental analytical method.
Because of the complexity and the need for process automation, we separate the instrumentation into conventional instrumentation and analytical instrumentation.
Conventional instrumentation is composed of meters for temperature, pressure, flow, etc., most of which already have transmitters and a blind indication, since there is no frequent need for calibration.
The analytical instrumentation, on the other hand, are pH meters, conductivity meters, spectrophotometers, and others, with transmitters attached and local indication, since there is a need for frequent calibration.
Analytical measurement can be qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative when the composition of a sample is determined and quantitative when the amount of each component of the sample is determined. In the latter case it is expressed as concentration, percentage, gram per m3, ppm or ppb.
Almost all physicochemical species can be qualified or quantified with the 3 families of analytical instrumentation, which are: amperometric, potentiometric and spectrophotometric.
The analytical instrumentation must be used in the process for an online control together with the laboratory to define and verify process values, and the field to verify ln-loco the measurements.
The analyzer is intended to measure one or more characteristics of a sample. Laboratory and field analyzers are actually commonly called meters and are used for development or supervisory monitoring of analyses.
Inline analyzers are called process or continuous analyzers and can be used for a purely supervisory function or to close a control loop, in which case the qualitative analysis is unnecessary, because there is already an assumed knowledge of the process. Its installation can be in situ, on situ or extractive. The in situ when the sensor operates immersed directly in the process, on-site when it operates close to it, but outside. And extractive when the sample is taken from the process through a fast loop or a bypass.
To optimize the efficiency in the control of the parameters, the closed loop is used, composed of a primary element that is the sensor that will qualify the parameter, the analyzer that will quantify it, the transmitter that will send this information to the controller, and this in turn, will act in the final control element. The controller is the one who will maintain the product's parameters as specified.
Another important factor to highlight is that each application has its own particularity, so even the analytical instrument can have different performance in different applications. Because of this, it is often necessary to develop a custom project, because these characteristics are crucial to the construction of an analytical system.
Facing all this complexity and importance, Digimed has been developing new technologies for over 40 years, so that we can deliver to each client not only an instrument, but a complete solution for each application.
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