Monitoring gas mixtures!

Tiger Optics are increasingly sought to monitor gas mixtures. To meet demand, Tiger said it is deploying more gas analyzers from its HALO product line, one of the company’s most versatile product ranges.

The development signals yet another milestone for Tiger Optics, which holds exclusive rights to multiple, broad-based patents from Princeton University on Continuous Wave Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CW CRDS). Tiger analysers detect the presence of fugitive components down to the low parts-per-trillion level in a variety of gases. Over the past decade, CW CRDS has advanced the analysis of many packaged pure gases, including inert gases, reactive gases (toxic gases, corrosives, and hydrides), and rare gases.

Mixed gas products are commonly used in calibration of chemical instruments, medical and healthcare facilities, laser applications, electronic manufacturing and metal welding. Each application has unique demands of precision in terms of the amounts of blended gases, as well as tolerance for impurities in the mixture.

“Water vapor is a common contaminant that can shorten the useful lifetime of packaged gas mixtures. Our HALO product line is a perfect fit for trace moisture analysis in quality control,” said Lisa Bergson, founder and chief executive of Tiger Optics.

Among the features that distinguish the HALO analyzers: fast response, high accuracy, wide detection range, and capacity to evaluate many base gases. The first HALO, introduced in 2006, was designed to offer the speed, specificity and reliability of the original Tiger tools at approximately half the price and one-quarter the size. The device measures moisture in a range from 2 parts-per-billion to 20 parts-per- million.

In 2007, Tiger unveiled HALO+, designed to analyze moisture in gases down to ultra-low levels (0.4 ppb to 20 ppm) required in semiconductor fabrication plants.

The latest addition, the HALO-500-H2O, permits a facility’s quality control lab to evaluate moisture levels over a very wide 20 ppb - 500 ppm range, encompassing expected moisture values in most gas mixtures. Even under conditions where high moisture samples are followed by sub ppm level samples, the HALO-H2O and HALO-500-H2O can achieve 95 percent of a reading in less than 3 minutes, thereby assuring fast, highly accurate measurements and outstanding sample throughput in the lab.

Such accuracy is essential if gas mixtures are to be evaluated with certitude. Mixtures comprising multiple (two to 100-plus) components are used to set the reference point or scale of laboratory, research, and industrial instruments to accepted primary standards. Meticulous blending to exact specification for each gas component is essential for high sensitivity and accurate measurements from calibrated equipment, such as detectors of environmental pollutants, monitors for breathing gases, and emissions analyzers for industrial manufacturing like fuel and petrochemical production. With HALO analyzers, moisture measurements are accurate to within 4 percent of each reading, thereby providing a great degree of confidence in the shelf life and stability of calibration mixtures.

A standard HALO analyzer includes a family of six base gases (argon, helium, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and clean dry air). The HALO gas menu can be enhanced with other base gases, such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, as well as gas mixtures. Options are also available for gas mixture samples that require compatible cell material (such as corrosion-resistant alloys) or specific operation settings (such as such as high/low flow or custom pressure range).