Small Business/SBIR

Space Life Support Analyzer Commercialized

A Wisconsin company is successfully commercializing water analyzers originally designed for hydroponics monitoring under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract sponsored by NASA at Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Applied Spectrometry Associates (ASA), Inc. of Waukesha, Wisconsin has installed over 100 ChemScan® systems at industrial and municipal facilities, including multiple parameter systems at major cities like Austin, Texas; Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Gainesville, Orlando and Tampa, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Los Angeles, California; New York City; Phoenix, Arizona; and Seoul, South Korea.

ASA President Bernie Beemster said his company is offering four models of its process analyzers. ASA bought the manufacturing rights from Biotronics Technologies, Inc., also of Waukesha, who originally worked with the KSC Biomedical Office under the SBIR contract to develop the analyzer.

Commercially, process analyzers are used to measure multiple chemicals at municipal drinking water treatment plants and municipal wastewater treatment plants, or in industrial water chemistry processes. Typical applications for process analyzers are large flow volumes, a dynamic chemical matrix, and a substantial motive to obtain real-time chemical analysis information, according to Beemster.

In 1998 ASA added a new model to its ChemScan® product line, the UV-2150 Process Analyzer, offering improved reliability and reduced operation and maintenance cost for automatic analysis of ammonia or phosphate in water.

NASA needed a water chemistry analyzer for monitoring hydroponic plant nutrients in the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) program to support developing systems to resupply food, water and air, not from Earth, but from the carbon dioxide they expel based on plant production systems.

The ChemScan® analyzers can be applied to various municipal water and industrial processing plants, saving money due to low maintenance times and on-line monitoring, either in-plant or at remote locations. These analyzers require only a few hours each month for maintenance, including the time required for preparation of reagents. Very little time is required for calibration verification or adjustment, and no time is required for recalibration. According to Beemster, customers using this analyzer say it requires less maintenance than any other chemical analyzer in their facility. Reliability is the most important attribute for a process analyzer, particularly if the output from the analyzer is going to be used as data for operation or adjustment of a treatment process.

ChemScan can detect any chemical substance that absorbs light in the ultraviolet or visible wavelength range. Ions of nutrients, ions of heavy metals that form coordination compounds in water, unsaturated (double bonded or triple bonded) hydrocarbons and aromatics are usually good candidates for analysis using ultraviolet or visible spectrometry. Chemicals that possess natural absorbance characteristics can be detected directly using primary absorbance techniques.