LECO announces the addition of hydrogen analysis capabilities to the 828 series, which will transform the way users determine carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen in a variety of petrochemical and other organic materials. The CHN828 maintains the core capabilities and performance of previous generations of LECO macro combustion instruments while possessing key improvements in throughput, uptime, and reliability. By incorporating state-of-the-art hardware and an on-board touch-screen software platform with rapid analysis times, the CHN828 operates at a low cost-per-analysis and allows users to easily handle the most demanding sample applications.

When the TruMac® Macro Determinator at the Southern African Grain Laboratory (SAGL) needed to be replaced, laboratory manager Jolanda Nortjé returned to LECO for an updated solution. For the past twenty years, LECO had been providing the SAGL with excellent service support, and their TruMac and previous nitrogen analyzers had been LECO products they were very satisfied with. At the end of 2019, trusting LECO again, the SAGL purchased a LECO FP928 to replace their TruMac.

How efficient is your workflow when it comes to food samples? Are you sure you're seeing everything your sample has to offer? Learn how LECO has been expanding what is possible when it comes to food safety analyses with a free series of webinars.

All of these webinars are now available as on-demand recordings on our website.

Why do you use the sample container that you use? Is it something you've ever thought about? Sample containers and crucibles are both wonderfully simple, to hold your sample without influencing the analysis, and wonderfully complex... to hold your sample without influencing the analysis.

But are you using the best container for your type of sample?

Determining the moisture content in cannabis and hemp is a critical factor in the growth and distribution of the process. Too much moisture can be indicative of microbial contamination, which can lead to health risks in the end user. It is also crucial to determine moisture content when extracting CBD oil. However, the plant nature of cannabis makes traditional loss-on-drying methods difficult, as the plant matter could be lost to thermal decomposition, resulting in falsely high moisture results.

Well-balanced crops require well-balanced soil. While carbon may be the most essential element for organic life, the right ratio of nitrogen and sulfur in the soil along with the carbon can really influence the speed and strength of plant development and growth. With a macro combustion carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur determinator such as LECO's CNS928, those ratios can be discovered easily through fast and precise analysis.

There’s coal and then there’s coal, and Santa Claus knows the difference. When preparing coal for the stockings of naughty boys and girls on Christmas Eve, Santa is not about to waste high quality, high-carbon material on children who have been bad. But while Santa is magic and can tell in an instant which coal is appropriate, how can those of us not lucky enough to work out of the North Pole determine our coal quality?

Working with grains meant a lot of thermogravimetric analyses, but standard oven drying methods were incredibly time-consuming. Depending on the flour matrix, oven times could range from 1 hour to 17. Whole grains could take a full 72 hours. LECO Africa reached out to Jolanda Nortjé, Laboratory Manager of The Southern African Grain Laboratory (SAGL), with a suggestion of a better way, and Nortjé was happy to give it a try. She agreed to participate in a comparison of a primary moisture loss-on-drying determination using the TGM800 and standard oven drying methods.

Did you catch our recent article on Food Navigator? Nitrogen content in food materials is necessary to measure when determining the total protein content. This measurement of nitrogen content can be performed using a classical wet chemistry method, but this tends to be a slow and tedious process. The combustion-based Dumas method has gained popularity in recent years as it significantly increases laboratory productivity. Yet when the sample has a low level of nitrogen it can be challenging to analyze. Examples of these hard-to-analyze samples include dry corn starch, NDIN filter bags, nutritional drinks, and beer. How can the combustion method be optimized to accommodate these lower-level nitrogen samples?

Our innovative analytical instrumentation provides users with solutions for a wide range of applications. We want to help your lab succeed, which is why we share examples of the processes, methods of analysis, and results our instruments can obtain in the form of application notes. We want our current and potential customers to feel at ease with our instrumentation in the lab, and our application notes highlight the right instrument for each specific application.