New Moisture Analyser Pushes Upward Range to 500 ppm

The Halo-500-H2OTM, designed to measure higher levels of moisture in gases, is gaining notice from gas manufacturers and metrology institutes, reports Tiger Optics LLC (USA), the manufacturer that developed the product at the behest of its London-based representative.

“Any quality gas laboratory that is doing moisture analysis would be interested. The alternatives aren’t really working,” said Tim Butler, who -- as founder and sales director of Process Analyser Systems Ltd. – encouraged Tiger Optics to develop the Halo-500 instrument in 2008. Butler subsequently sold the device to The Linde Group’s BOC, the largest provider of industrial, medical and special gases in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“The Halo-500 looks tailor-made for more applications than even we anticipated,” said Lisa Bergson, Tiger Optics’ founder and chief executive. “Of course, from the outset, we appreciated the need of many quality assurance labs to measure samples of gas that contain 100, 200, 300 ppm or higher of moisture.”
The device’s range is tipping the scales for some buyers who had been using gas analyzers based on older technologies. The Halo line, like all Tiger Optics products, utilizes the patented “Continuous Wave Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy” technology.

In the packaged gas market, the Halo-500 covers the moisture specifications of a myriad of products. The device can measure moisture in samples such as hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, the noble gases, and clean dry air. Renowned for its swift response, the Halo-500 permits a facility’s quality control lab to switch between different samples in a matter of seconds, instead of minutes. Even under conditions where the instrument is exposed to ambient air, the Halo-500 can achieve 90 percent of a reading in less than 3 minutes. In such facilities, the Halo-500 can be used to monitor the high-usage or “house” gases that are plumbed through work areas. The device is similarly speedy and adept at measuring moisture in gas cylinders that are reclaimed and prepared for fresh use. The Halo-500 is proving equally useful in moisture monitoring in air separation processes, and in quality checks at “fill zones” where refrigerated trucks load merchant products in liquid form.

Tiger introduced its first Halo product in 2006 as a “mini” CW-CRDS device because it offered the speed, specificity and reliability of the original Tiger tools at approximately half the price and one-quarter of its size. The original Halo measures moisture in a range from 2 ppb to 20 ppm. In 2007, Tiger unveiled its Halo+ product, designed to analyze moisture in gases down to ultra-low levels (0.4 ppb to 20 ppm) required in semiconductor fabrication plants.

“The Halo line now constitutes well over half of our sales,” said Bergson.