Latest News and Application Notes

When you think of a sports competition, you may picture several athletes at the tops of their game duking it out for supremacy, whether on a pitch, a track, a course, a pool, or wherever else their sport takes them. But sport competitions can transcend humans challenging each other. The competition in the sports equipment industry is just as fierce as that between players.

The Rockwell hardness test is one of the fastest and most convenient hardness testing methods used around the world. With the lack of sample prep and optical requirements, it is the easiest to work into automated production lines, and the common Rockwell hardness scale C (HRC) is an easy way to refer to the hardness of metals that even the lay person can understand. However, it is not the only hardness testing method. Knoop (HK) and Vickers (HV) hardness testing methods can also find the hardness of a material, but the values are not interchangeable. To compare material hardness, the values must be in the same hardness scale.

It remains impossible to predict the future accurately, no matter how much we try. While market forecasts and trends tend to illustrate the future of products, reality always has a chance to throw a curveball. Between the global COVID-19 lockdowns suppressing most markets and a trend toward renewable energy sources, coal was expected to start decreasing in market value. Instead, a war between Russia and Ukraine and the lifting of lockdowns has actually driven a higher demand.

Few things in the world bring people together like food. Flavor and aroma are often central pillars of a good time. Whether it’s developing a meat substitute or characterizing the subtle intricacies of liquor, the study of food, flavor, and aromas is critical to so many industries that touch everyone around the world.

Pet ownership has increased over the last few years, when an explosive boom during the COVID-19 lockdowns showing no signs of stopping. Over 70% of American households have at least one pet, with most of those homes having at least one cat or dog. As pet ownership continues to rise, so too does the demand for pet food.

The analysis of peppers for flavor profiles and food volatiles is not new. With a wide array of varieties, peppers find uses in not just food markets, but also pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Analyzing peppers isn't new. Finding ways to increase the sustainability and "green" qualities of those analyses, however, is an ongoing challenge, and one that Micaela Galletta, Mariosimone Zoccali, Donato Creti, Luigi Mondello, and Peter Q. Tranchida tackled in a recent study published in Green Analytical Chemistry.

In the race between the tortoise and the hare, which style of instrument analysis is best for your lab? Slow and steady or fast and loose? Unlike the fable, however, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to elemental analysis, and that is precisely why LECO's instruments do not employ one-size-fits-all methods.

As global industrialization has increased, so too has global waste. Over 2.6 trillion pounds of waste are generated worldwide each year. Energy demands continue to grow year over year, and the Earth's population is looking toward greener solutions. Those 2.6 trillion pounds of trash may be waste now, but some of it may be suitable as biomass.

How do you handle the analysis and characterization of a complex sample like whisky*? In a recent interview with eFood Lab International, Dr. Geraint (Taff) Morgan of the Applied Science & Technology Group at the Open University, UK, says a 1D quadrupole GC-MS is sufficient for routine analysis, but when he really wants to dig into the non-target analysis of a complex sample, he turns to GC-TOFMS and GCxGC-TOFMS, such as that employed by the LECO Pegasus^® BT 4D.

For those of us old enough to remember life before computers, it's impossible to deny the convenience modern software has brought to our lives. Just the speed at which a letter can be written up (legibly!), copied, and dispersed to colleagues around the world via email might have been considered unthinkable eighty-six years ago, when LECO was founded. But with the advent of software has come numerous frustrations as well. Have you ever learned one shortcut in one piece of software, such as Ctrl+Shift+S to save as, only to find it's something completely different in another (F12, perhaps?). If you develop a flow to your work in one piece of software but have to move to a different program for a different instrument, you can actually lose productivity as you struggle to switch gears and relearn your flow.

That's not how LECO likes to work. One of the cornerstones of our success is our Cornerstone^® brand software. Whether you're measuring moisture on a TGM800 or determining carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur simultaneously with a CNS928, our Cornerstone software is the same. It looks the same, it acts the same, and it's laid out the same, making it easy and intuitive to move from instrument to instrument as you process your samples.