1CPAC: May 11, 2006

NeSSIfying GC

a proposal to the Washington Technology Center

Brian Rohrback, Infometrix, Inc.

CPAC TeamDavid Veltkamp, Brian Marquardt, Mel Koch and

Jaromir Ruzicka

2CPAC: May 11, 2006

Life in the Petroleum Industry

US Oil sector shed more than 500,000 jobs between 1982 and 2005

American Petroleum Institute surveyed and found a projected need for 30,000 engineers over the next 5 years

Total current enrollment in petroleum-related engineering programs in US universities stands at 1,500

http://www.ptsstaffing.com/ptsnews_05q3.pdf

3CPAC: May 11, 2006

Whither Process GC?

• Process GCs generate a lot of data; very little of the information content of that data is mined from the existing installations

• Automation has to reduce maintenance demands of the on-line instruments

• There is a strong need to standardize and simplify the calibration of a collection of process GCs (worldwide?)

• There are powerful financial and quality incentives to bring more complex GC analysis on-line

4CPAC: May 11, 2006

WTC ProposalSoftware and Algorithm Tasks

• Retention time alignment– Test additional algorithms for speed and computer

horsepower requirements

– Evaluate accuracy precision of shift and quantitation

• Evaluate EZChrom• Use chemometrics tools to develop a reliable means of

making hardware corrections automatically• GC data compression

5CPAC: May 11, 2006

WTC ProposalPrototyping a NeSSI GC

• Design and construction of fluidics– Build a test platform to handle stream switching, blending

and sample injection

• NeSSI GC interface– Integrate the ASI MicroFast GC

– Assess feasibility of commercial microfabricated GCs

• Sensor addition/data fusion– Use of vaporchromic sensors, temperature, pressure, …

– Differentiate instrument malfunction from process upsets

6CPAC: May 11, 2006

WTC ProposalApplications

• Evaluate three hydrocarbon analysis applications– Extract organics from a wastewater stream and ID source

– Test pollutants in air to schedule maintenance

– Characterize input naphtha to optimize a catalytic cracker

• Expand the application base– Draw from food, pharmaceutical, biotech

– Evaluate the commonality of function

7CPAC: May 11, 2006

3 instruments: C8 to C19 hydrocarbons

Raw data

20 40 60Time (seconds)

Instrument to instrument consistency

8CPAC: May 11, 2006

3 instruments: C8 to C19 hydrocarbons

Auto-Aligned

20 40 60Time (seconds)

Instrument to instrument consistency

9CPAC: May 11, 2006

PCA scores before and after alignment

Alignment gives us:

A means of eliminating the run-to-run variability that affects all forms of chromatography.

Requires no internal standards and no use (in the traditional sense) of external standards, both of which are impractical.

10CPAC: May 11, 2006

Process GC data processing in action

11CPAC: May 11, 2006

Process Gas Chromatographs

• Reviewed 12 systems that can be used in process analysis – ABB, Emerson, Foxboro,

Siemens, Yokogawa

– Agilent, PerkinElmer, Shimadzu, Thermo, Varian

– ASI, SLS Micro

• Selected 3 as the focus of the current development effort, driven by CPAC interest, cost to develop, and time to market

12CPAC: May 11, 2006

Summary

• To use chromatography in a process setting, we need to process the data automatically.

• Retention time drift is a constant companion but can be corrected by software in a fully automated way.

• The result of alignment is better run-to-run peak identification and can unify data from more than one chromatograph.

• With aligned data, interpretation is both more sensitive and more reliable, allowing unattended assessment of samples, the instrument and the process as a whole.