FlavourSpec®: Sensitive Analyser for Food, Flavour and Beverage testing
The FlavourSpec® comprises advantages of a Gas Chromatograph (GC) with regard to selectivity and outstanding sensitivity of an Ion Mobility Spectrometer (IMS) enabling the analysis of volatiles in the headspace of liquids and solid samples without any sample pre-treatment.
The FlavourSpec operates isotherm in a range of 40-80°C and can be set to >100°C for baking out (cleaning). To better separate compounds the instrument uses a firmware steered ramping by its integrated Electronic Pneumatic Controller.
Besides the instrument itself the FlavourSpec® consists of an automatic headspace injector that does all sample conditioning. The operator just enters the measurement parameters (number of samples, conditioning and run time) via the very easy to operate menu on the sampler.
The FlavourSpec provides an automatic data acquisition on the device and when connected to a PC 3-D data visualization and analysis by G.A.S. Laboratory Analytical Viewer (LAV) software. Besides the possibility of quantifying single marker compounds additional software plug-ins allow to easily detect the appearance of new compounds or the differences of their concentrations to a reference sample to further match peak pattern with sensory wise defined flavours. The result classifies differences from a selected reference (golden standard) to quickly characterize e.g. the quality of a sample. This concept follows the approach of the so-called electronic nose, but using a specific and reliable physical separation/detection of the volatile compounds by GC plus IMS instead.
Further to that the GCxIMS Library Search software tool is based on the NIST retention (Kovats) indices which consists of more than 80,000 compounds and which can further be extended by the IMS drift times to achieve maximum certainty for unknown compounds in samples.
Being particularly developed for the quality testing the FlavourSpec is characterized by hands-on functionalities and outstanding user friendliness that due to its outstanding sensitivity (low ppb/µg/L-range) does not require any sample pre-treatment. By that laborious and time consuming stripping using solvents can be avoided and most important samples can be analyzed at detection level of the human nose “as they are” without changing their characteristics.
All these characteristics together make the FlavourSpec a unique and innovative trend setting analytical tool with proven applications in several analytical fields at most renowned market leading global players of the food & beverage industry (e.g. control of raw material quality and storage conditions, flavour stability and off-flavour detection, process control, product quality test and authentication etc).
