Sierra Mass Flowmeters Are GHG Certified

Sierra Instruments has introduced a line of mass flowmeters certified by Sierra for greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting. The company said that all Sierra GHG meters now conform to the new EPA rule (40 CFR Part 98), which mandates that as of 2 January 2010, companies in the US that emit more than 25,000 tons/year of CO2 equivalent must report GHG emissions.

Sierra claimed its GHG certified mass flowmeters provide an economical way to totalise methane or natural gas burned, enabling the calculation of CO2-equivalent emissions. Sierra has experience in producing accurate and repeatable mass flowmeters for methane (CH4) as well as N20, SF6, HFCs, PFCs and CO2. The three GHG certified thermal mass flowmeters are the Boiler-Trak, model 640S and model 780S.

Sierra Boiler-Trak is a thermal mass flowmeter designed for stationary combustion applications (commercial boilers, kilns and heaters), which are among the largest emitters of CO2. Sierra model 640S has been optimised for landfill gas, the second largest source of CO2. Landfill gas is very humid, at low pressure (20-40mbar/g) and about 40C to 60C when it leaves the landfill.

The 640S has 100:1 turndown, no moving parts, and generates nominal pressure drop across the immersible sensor probe, and so it is ideal for this application, Sierra said. The Sierra model 780S was designed for gas and electricity producers, the third largest category of CO2 emitters. This flowmeter is routinely used by gas and power plants to measure methane to compressors, pre-heaters, boilers and other process equipment.

Thermo Fisher Releases Mass Frontier 6.0 Package

Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched Mass Frontier 6.0: a software package offering sophisticated features for the management, evaluation and interpretation of mass spectra. The software is applicable to small-molecule structural elucidation in a range of applications, including metabolite identification and impurity analysis in drug-discovery and toxicology studies.

Providing comprehensive spectral data and fragmentation mechanism knowledge management, this new version of Mass Frontier facilitates structural elucidation by simplifying the interpretation of MSn spectral data. The software will be showcased at the Thermo Scientific hospitality suite at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown in Salons G-K during ASMS, which runs from 31 May to 4 June in Philadelphia. Mass Frontier 6.0 includes several software tools for processing and organising mass spectral and chromatographic data.

Providing a platform to determine structure, properties and class membership of small molecules, the software offers users fast access to useful information, providing them with the data they need to make decisions. A capability of Mass Frontier is its copyrighted Fragmentation Library, which contains fragmentation mechanisms for small molecules. These mechanisms have been collated from all available printed media dedicated to mass spectrometry.

Each mechanism, along with the chemical structures, is manually and automatically verified and saved in the library, along with complementary information such as the title, authors and the source. The library collection, together with 24 general ionisation, fragmentation and rearrangement rules, serves as a knowledge base for the prediction of fragmentation pathways from user-provided structures. With Mass Frontier 6.0, the Fragmentation Library now covers almost all published literature, allowing users to quickly search thousands of entries, eliminating the time lost to a manual literature search.

The library, along with Mass Frontier's predictive fragmentation tool and automatic spectral annotation, is intended to simplify the structural elucidation of mass spectral data. In addition to the literature-based Fragmentation Library, Mass Frontier 6.0 also allows users to create their own library of customised fragmentation mechanisms and is able to learn these mechanisms and apply them to predict fragments. The new version also offers SQL client-server capabilities for dynamic library searching and storage, which is intended to increase productivity by allowing multiple users to share access to the libraries and to manage knowledge more effectively.

Additionally, Mass Frontier provides expert-annotated spectral libraries in both positive and negative ionisation modes from common pharmaceutical compounds and human metabolites. These libraries establish an empirical knowledge database applicable to pharmacology and toxicology studies. The software features intelligent knowledge management systems with a flexible database structure, allowing heterogeneous data (spectrum, spectral tree, structure, fragmentation mechanism and experimental conditions) to be stored, transferred and queried in and between libraries.

MSn spectral trees acquired from Thermo Scientific ion trap products can be automatically deconvoluted in Mass Frontier, which assists in data comparison. The Fragment Ion Search (FISh) function provides fast screening for structurally similar compounds through filtering a list of fragments acquired either by theoretical fragment prediction or by experimental MSn spectral trees.

The product complements Thermo Scientific Metworks metabolite identification software for the study of biotransformations and Sieve differential analysis software for the study of metabolomics. The new version of the software is also fully compatible with high-resolution accurate-mass data from the Thermo Scientific LTQ Orbitrap family of products. The software streamlines data processing and boosts confidence in analytical results, according to the company. Fragmentation Library and Mass Frontier are trademarks of Highchem.