Linde Gases, a subsidiary of The Linde Group, has made a world record by developing a revolutionary 110-component calibration gas mixture. The gases used were among those from the Group’s SPECTRA range.
Linde Gases announced just today that the company has been awarded a Guinness World Record for the greatest number of separate chemical components in a single gas mixture.
The combination was developed by Linde’s HiQ® speciality gases range and constitutes the largest number of components of any known calibration gas in commercial use today and represents a unique technical achievement. Staggeringly, the gas mixture incorporates over a hundred Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).
Linde produced the custom 110-component mixture for TestAmerica who are using the standard in their Texas laboratory for environmental analysis. The gas standard will be used to detect and assess VOCs in samples of indoor and ambient air to deduce safety levels, whilst also working to identify the potential source of pollution.
Stephen Mandel, Head of Environmental and Calibration Products at Linde, remarked, “Calibration is vital in order to produce reliable information about the quality of the environment around us. Technologically complex and sophisticated gas standards such as Linde’s new 110-component gas mixture are becoming essential to deliver greater efficiency and confidence in laboratories.”
Formulating such a complex gas mixture involves three stages; evaluation of the possible interaction of various components, guaranteeing the stability of the resulting mixture, and the accurate manufacture of both the final mixture as well as its housing. TestAmerica’s Air Product Director, William Elcoate, described Linde’s involvement: “Linde Gases’ development provided us the capability to have most of these compounds of interest under one analytical standard, cutting the time for set-up and calibration of our own laboratory instruments, and allowing us to run more samples.”
With a growing stringency of regulations and new compounds to evaluate, laboratories are being regularly confronted with new challenges and are under pressure to expand their scope and expertise. Consequently, this type of achievement both tests and demonstrates the capabilities of the industrial gases sector. In this instance, the gases involved were standards from the SEPCTRA range by Linde.
... to continue reading you must be subscribed
