Samara Polytech chemists designed portable analyzers

Despite their high accuracy, the majority of the existing instrumental laboratory methods are very laborious and insufficient in terms of quick analysis of the objects under study. A team of scientists of Samara Polytech design cost effective portable analyzers. The recent research results are published in the journal of the American Chemical Society (doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.0c01018).

“Our laboratory works with optical multisensor systems based on various physical principles of spectroscopy, allowing the observations in several spectral ranges”, Anastasiia Surkova, Candidate of Chemistry, researcher of the “Multivariate Analysis and Global Modelling” laboratory explains. “The portable analyzers that we designed require no sampling and they work like this: the device illuminates the object under study at selected wavelengths, and the result of the interaction of light and the sample is read by the detector through a light-guide cable. The detected signal is sent to a computer, where the information is processed using a special mathematical model and the received data is decrypted. By the way, our task is both to make the mathematical optimization of the multisensor system for the selected application and to develop the corresponding predictive models”.
To control each connected device, including data collection and calculation of the analysis result using the built-in model, special software is required. In order to fulfill this task, several years ago the laboratory staff developed a unique “cloud” application TPT-cloud. Now a company in Spain is engaged in its further professional development.

Optical multisensor systems can be used for quantitative and qualitative analysis of the objects under study in various fields such as medical diagnostics, quality control in the food and pharmaceutical industries, effective environmental monitoring, etc.

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Samara Polytech as a flagship university offers a wide range of education and research programs and aims at development and transfer of high-quality and practically-oriented knowledge. The university has an established reputation in technical developments and focuses on quality education, scientific and pragmatic research, combining theory and practice in the leading regional businesses and enterprises. Education is conducted in 30 integrated groups of specialties and areas of training (about 200 degree programs including bachelor, master programs and 55 PhD programs) such as oil and gas, chemistry and petrochemistry, mechanics and energy, transportation, food production, defense, IT, mechanical and automotive engineering, engineering systems administration and automation, material science and metallurgy, biotechnology, industrial ecology, architecture, civil engineering and design, etc.

In 2014, the laboratory “Multivariate Analysis and Global Modelling” was established in Samara Polytech. For the five years of work, this university laboratory became an authoritative analytical center cooperating with representatives of science and business around the world. The laboratory staff is engaged in the development of scientific foundations of optical multisensor systems development, an important role in which belongs to the expert methods of the analysis of spectral and other multidimensional data – a new discipline known as chemometrics.

Multivariate data analysis or chemometrics is a scientific discipline that studies multifactorial objects, processes and phenomena based on the use of mathematical and statistical methods. This modern area of cross-disciplinary knowledge of chemistry, mathematics and engineering, is widely used in various fields where there is a need to study a large amount of data and to search for various kinds of patterns.