| Author | Message | ||
     Madhusudan Dave (Mmdave1) |
Dear All, In fact I belong to one Dairy equipment manufacturing co..And recently we have started about exploring NIR spectorscopy for 900-1600 nm band. Our prime concern is about to analyze milk constituents(fat, solid non fat, protein , lactose, added water contents,ph etc.) by measuring the % presence. For this purpose we want a kind of NIR Light source , a device which can attentuate perticular frequency or a band , and detector/receiver for the said range of electro magnetic spectrum. what are the analyzing techniques used for? And from where can i get additional information? | ||
| Madhusudan Dave (Mmdave1) |
We want to manufacture the instrument.so kindly guide us | ||
| hlmark |
Dave - I read your messages on the discussion group of the NIR Council, and basically it seems like you need major help. Some of the components of a modern instrument are relatively easy to specify (for example, the source universally used is a tungsten-halogen lamp) but others are not so easy. For example, there are many possibilites for the wavelength-selection part of the instrument: filters, diffraction gratings, acousto-optical tunable filters, interferometric and non-interferometric FT (Fourier-transform) devices, diode arrays, LED's and others. Similarly regarding detectors. The choices are going to depend on the requirements for the final instrument: measurement speed, cost, robustness, environment, etc. Much of what is done in the hardware is closely tied in with the software and the data processing that is done post-measurement. Instrument design for the NIR is not a trivial task. I have one or two recommendations to make, though: 1) Pittcon is coming up at the end of this month. Before making any commitments, I suggest you attend the conference and go to the exhibits; many, or even most of the current NIR manufacturers will be there, and you can get an idea of what is currently being done, and the variety in how it is done. 2) If, as I suspect, you have not been exposed to NIR previously, take one of the short courses in NIR analysis that is being offered at the conference. There you will get a good, if compressed, introduction to the field. Howard Mark \o/ /_\ | ||
| Gabi |
Dear all, With all due respect, I am not sure that this is the forum for helping commercial enterprises in a direct way - if they manufacture dairy manufacturing equipment and want to expand the line of their business by supplying the spectrometers as well, than they shall invest in learning the subject matter, or hire people, etc. I am from a commecrial enterprise and try (mostly successfuly) not to use this forum for business purposes in such an explicit way. Thanks, Gabi Levin | ||
| hlmark |
Gabi - your point is well-taken. On the other hand, someone with a question about NIR cannot be excluded simply because he happens work for a commercial company, not even if it's an instrument manufacturer! After all, most people do work for some company or other. Seems to me that Dave's question was in itself not directly commercial; he wanted to know where he could learn more about NIR, which seems legitimate to me, and so I responded in that vein. It's not like he's asking for direct advice on designing his instrument. If Dave is serious he will have to do all you suggest, and more, but I don't have a problem with him posing the question he did. Would you have had a problem is he hadn't sent his second message? \o/ /_\ | ||
| MPDC |
Hi Dave, You are in for quite a project! I have worked on develloping a NIR analyser and if you want a good instrument it is quite an investment! As Howard suggested, you can go to Pittcon and there will be plenty of "half-way" analysers which should be reasonably easy to build into your equipment. These risk however to be quite expensive and the question is if you can get enough financial return on them to pay for all the people who will have to do calibration, repairs, customer support etc. In order to be really competitive, you have to design an instrument specifically designed towards its purpose so all components are just "good enough", but not "too good" (and too expensive). This fine-tuning of your design can take quite some time and money. Example: all spectrometers become more stable if they are temperature stabilised. Will you invest in heating the cabinet, cooling, or both? If you cool, do you use a Pelletier cooling (expensive) or a vortex cooler (customer must have an air compressor)? You could decide just to heat up the instrument to above room temperature, but components will age faster when warm, and most (N)IR detectors become more noisy with increasing temperature. And what is room temperature anyway? The answer will be different in India then in Canada. Building a super-instrument is actually not that difficult, but it will cost you! An alternative would be to team up with an existing supplier, act as a reseller and push them hard to get a good deal (say hi to Gabi from me ;-) In the end it is a business decision of course, and God knows I am not the man to help you with that. I just want to make sure you understand what you are getting yourself into. If you do decide to go for "build from scratch", I suggest you team up with a local university and have some smart brains think this one out. Good luck! |