Featured in Vacuum Technology and Coatings Magazine: Underwater Vacuum Technology
December 2005
Vacuum technologists are typically focused on providing an appropriate vacuum environment for a production or R&D application where the vacuum chamber has benefit of air conditioned comfort in a lab or clean room. But imagine the complexity added if the vacuum chamber was at the bottom of the ocean—and had to remain there for months at a time. Such is the situation faced by Monitor Instruments (Monitor, Cheswick, PA) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI, Woods Hole MA).
They have been awarded a grant by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) to develop and deploy a membrane inlet mass spectrometer to measure undersea dissolved gas and hydrocarbon concentration—unattended and for long periods of time. A daunting task...
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About Monitor Instruments
Monitor Instruments Company LLC was founded in 1992 as the Monitor Group, to develop chemical analysis instrumentation for emerging requirements in laboratory, industrial, biomedical and field portable applications. There was, and continues to be, a growing unfilled need for smaller, faster, reliable and economically priced instruments with high-end performance. Mass spectrometry – specifically cycloidal designs - was identified as the technology most likely to satisfy this emerging market need.
The initial research and development program was focused on linear cycloidal technology. The intent was to miniaturize this design while maintaining the performance characteristics needed by the market. This effort produced a patented miniature ionizer and ion optics design, which was incorporated in prototype instruments used in field testing. Lessons learned in this extensive four-year field test and evaluation program were continuously incorporated in both hardware and software. The result was the field tested Series 3000 cycloidal mass spectrometers.
