Latest News and Application Notes

Coal and other biofuels are no different from every other substance that can be bought and sold: the quality of the material plays a huge role in the determination of the price. With coal and other solid fuels, the amount of volatile matter is the main factor in quality, as this determines the burning rates of the fuel. While the volatile matter value does rely on the type of fuel and moisture content of said fuel being tested, it also varies based on the heating rates used in the tests to determine the value.

No matter where you are in the urban landscape, you are never more than a few feet from cement. Cement forms the basis of virtually the entire world’s infrastructure. It is an impressively cheap binder that enables a wide variety of building materials. Despite its ubiquity, it is a surprisingly complex mixture of a balance of ingredients such as lime, silica, alumina and more. Knowing what is in your cement is a fundamental check of its quality and strength.

The thermogravimetric analyses of the TGA801 and its predecessors can do more than measure organic materials. With its ability to handle large, gram-sized samples, the TGA801 has become an invaluable tool for the monitoring of industrial byproducts, such as flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) solids.

Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) first started in the early 20th century, and while the technology has advanced, the basic principles remain the same. With TGA, the rate of change of reactions in the chemical and physical properties of materials as functions of temperature or time is what is used to assess the properties of the sample materials. Most TGA these days is done with either micro TGAs (using milligram-size samples) or macro TGAs (using gram-size samples).

Running and maintaining a full analytical laboratory can be more cost than a company can afford, but what other options are there for a small business looking for quality control and regulatory compliance? Independent testing and consulting laboratories groups such as the Tentamus Group, can fill that gap. One of its laboratories, bilacon, specializes in the safety of food, feed, food supplements, and cosmetics. 

In a recent interview with eFOOD-Lab International, Benjamin Ende, a state-certified food chemist with bilacon, talked about the benefits of LECO's TGA801 thermogravimetric analyzer in his lab's day-to-day operations.

So many factors go into the quality and characterization of plants and biomass, but many thermogravimetric analyses take so much time. Drying, ashing, and weighing multiple samples takes effort and care just to control for atmospheric effects, much less to actually get precise results that can then be used to analyze the quality and structure of the plants. LECO's TGA801 is an automated thermogravimetric analyzer designed to take the time out of the testing.

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?

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.

We’re always looking for ways to improve your lab experience, and this means designing our products to help solve your lab’s biggest challenges. Our latest generation of thermogravimetric analyzers, the TGA801, introduces a number of improvements best suited for YOU and your analysis. The TGA801 is ideal for determining multiple constituents such as moisture, ash, volatile content, and LOI in a variety of organic, inorganic, and synthetic materials.