SBIR Phase II: A carbon selective detector for liquid phase chemical detection of organic molecules

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the potential to directly and positively impact the speed of chemical analysis leading to cleaner and more advanced products. Technology resulting from the proposed activity will solve several pain points in the chemical analysis industry, including non-linearity, small dynamic range and variable, sometimes negligible, detector response. As a result, the technology will have broad use and lead to improved detection in pharmaceuticals, drug development, fuels, chemicals, renewables, foods, flavors, and academic and industrial research. Uniform response to carbon from flame ionization detection (FID) would be completely disruptive to the painstaking methods of calibration of known compounds and the guesswork associated with the quantification of unknowns. The benefits of this technology are expected to result in immense improvements in the speed and accuracy of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, thereby leading to better and safer products, with faster development times. Applied to the pharmaceutical and new drug development industry, this technology will have lasting impacts on the health and safety of society due to better and faster analyses available. This SBIR Phase II project aims to deliver a carbon selective detector (CSD) to the global scientific market. The CSD is a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) detector that produces a linear response to all organic compounds using a flame ionization detection (FID) and a catalytic reactor. The key innovation is the novel development and use of a catalytic reactor to transform organic molecules and remove solvent in liquid chromatograph effluent streams. The FID, similar to those ubiquitous in gas chromatography (GC) systems, yields a universal response to organic compounds converted to methane with unparalleled linear range and robustness. The device will overcome limitations of the FID that have prevented previous use in HPLC by selectively removing solvents, oxidizing organic compounds to carbon dioxide, reducing carbon dioxide to methane, and detecting the resulting methane with the FID. The resulting product features, most notably a universal response to carbon, will provide pre-clinical pharmaceutical researchers with a tool that can quantify drugs and their by-products during screening, long before the process has been scaled up for the production of calibration standards. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.