First Gas Chromatography Device Based on Silicon Nano-scale Components

Analytical Pixels Technology (France) recently announced the release of its first commercial product: GCAPTM, a gas chromatography device designed for a variety of industrial and petrochemical applications, including process monitoring, energy distribution, safety and security and environmental control.

This device, designed, assembled and tested by Analytical Pixels Technology (APIX), is based on nano-scale silicon components licensed from the CEA-Leti and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The silicon components are manufactured in Leti’s advanced semiconductor facility in Grenoble and system assembly and test are performed in APIX’s facility in Grenoble.

“GCAP’s very flexible, versatile architecture, based on high-density silicon columns and sensors, means GCAP can be configured to perform in a number of different modes, including conventional, multi-dimensional or concurrent analysis,” said Dr. Pierre Puget, APIX co-founder and CTO. “This makes it the ideal tool for research laboratories, advanced gas analysis, and complex applications such as biomedical screening.

“One of GCAP’s key features is its ability to work with a number of different carrier gases,” Puget continued. “This is made possible by the extreme sensitivity of the silicon nano-scale sensors at the heart of the system.”

In particular, the ability of GCAPTM to work with scrubbed air as a carrier gas in lieu of expensive, cumbersome bottled gases allows easy in-situ deployment, nearly real-time analysis, and a significant reduction in operating costs.

Additional major features of GCAPTM include its ability to: separate and precisely quantify individual molecules among hundreds of interfering substances, depending on architectural configurations; limit detection for most chemical compounds below 1 parts-per-million without pre-concentration and in the parts-per-billion range with pre-concentration; reduce the volume of analyte required to less than 10 microlitres, and the volume of carrier gas to less than 1 millilitre; analyse most chemicals is less than one minute.

The performance of GCAPTM, which is available for beta testing, has been well demonstrated with alkanes, permanent gases, volatile organic compounds and other materials.