Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:54:01 +0000
Hi all,
Part 2 of this saga. Many of you have had interesting views: well placed skepticism, as well as some interest. I did finally hear back from them and as I suspected there is a bit of language gap. Here is the email from them, with my thoughts below.
From: Dr. Ilgis Ibragimov [mailto:ii_at_elegant-math.de]
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2016 3:44 AM
To: NORMAN CHU/ Torcan/ Torcan-R&D/ Pharma Solution_Canada
Subject: Re: Request for more information on Elegant-NMR
Dear Norman,
thank you for your kind interest for the Elegant NMR Stick!
Let me answer to your questions:
>Practically speaking, how preliminary is your product? How many early beta testers have actually used this in the real world?
Indeed it is new, we are bug-fixing it now, in parallel with first beta tests, main issues are in leakage/resistance, and GUI need to be completed. Our intention to have 2-3 beta batches before it goes to customers.
> Have it been tested with a wide range of chemistries?
We tested them with several solvents, and mainly with strong acids, and plan to bug-fixing with coating to guarantee resistance.
> How does it handle heterogeneous chemistry (liquid+solid)?
Mainly it is designed for liquids. If solid phase will fouled inside measurement coils, it will deliver wrong results.
> Does the probe geometry help avoid fouling with solids in-situ?
We have right now issues for high viscous liquids, however, we already redesigned measuring area and plan next beta batch with new geometry. Hopefully it preserve fouling. One of our very prime customer is testing it on polycondensation reactions in polyester production.
> How easily can the probe be cleaned if fouled with solids?
Right now probe area is constructed with PTFE, so it can be easily cleaned.
> What are the wetted materials of the probe? You mention silicon coated stainless steel, but what is the full material compatibility?
We have PTFE inside the probe, and stainless-still case, coated with silicon. We are tending to have PTFE as only one material for complete probe that goes into vessel. Hence, full material compatibility for the probe should be equal to PTFE.
> Are there wetted seals which may be damaged by certain solvents?
Area that is going to in situ is solvent resistant as if PTFE is resistant for the solvent and temperature. An upper area above NS29 joint is IP68, but it is not solvent resistant and capable to work only on 0-70C, however, we require even stronger conditions 0-40C, since we have not yet completed long time stress tests. It means with external cooling connectors it is possible to cool the upper area even if in situ part work at 200-250C. Hope it is suitable for most industrial and preparative applications.
> Silicon (as in the metal) does not sound particularly corrosion resistant, while resistant to acids it is vulnerable to bases (NaOH).
You are right, we figured out this issue, and plan to perform only PTFE coating.
> Can the multidimensional decomposition method compensate for the fact that in most reactions the solvent is in gross excess of the substrate(s) of interest when separating out components?
Yes, it is one of the key feature of this technology.
> Does the technique also compensate for radiation damping from the very large solvent peaks with respect to the components in the reaction mixture?
Yes, and even more! The mathematics is designed to get pure spectra from mixtures without the reference data base. The only one requirement is to have continuous measurement during chemical reaction so that relative concentrations of involved substances changed during measurements.
> How well does the probe handle mixtures with salt content reducing the RF power reaching the sample volume?
the second key feature is simultaneous measurement of resonances from all non-zero spin isotopes, it helps a lot to overcome low magnetic field problems (we have only 1.2tesla=46MHz 1H resonance) where many peaks are highly overlapped, and get better deconvolution for geteronuclear spectra, primary for organometallic chemistry. I cannot say that these multi-dimensional spectra can be simply interpreted, however, it helps to resolve difference between isomers or similar substances. Hence, detection and control of impurity is usually successfully solved task for Elegant NMR Stick.
> What is the average measurement time for mixtures on the order of 20-200mM concentration?
In case if you have one substance dissolved in solvent need to be measured, it goes to about 10 minutes, by larger measurements you can also improve quality of spectra.
In case if you have chemical reaction running several hours, and you expect to monitor several substances that appears in the reaction mixture, first spectra comes in 10 minutes, however further spectra and concentration updates comes with only few seconds delay, so, real-time!
> Is the probe compatible with magnetic stirring, or mechanical stirring only?
Probe is incompatible with magnetic stirring, only mechanical and non magnetic, i.e. glass, PTFE stirrings are ok.
> We deal with process chemistry and scale up, so reaction profiling is of extreme interest to us. We have a few R&D scale on-line analytical techniques (calorimetry, in-situ FTIR, in-situ crystal observation) but reaction kinetics monitoring has always been an off-line process for us. The ability to monitor near real-time is the biggest interest here since we already have a 400MHz NMR running thousands of samples per year. Would this product be right for this application?
The Elegant NMR Stick is primary designed for your applications! Ones we were asked to supply our customer with real time monitoring, and there were no solution for it, so we decide to make the product ourself.
> I'd love to hear more about this, the Youtube videos I saw this were hard to understand but if presented more understandably, I think this would generate quite a bit of interest.
Sorry for not clear materials, we expect to fix it.
I will keep you updated with stress tests and further test experiments. Our main goal to broad the NMR as simple, robust and easy to use technology.
Sincerely,
Ilgis
-- Elegant Mathematics Ltd. Ilgis Ibragimov, PhD Hanauer Muehle 2 66564 Ottweiler-Fuerth Germany Tel: +49 6858 900 66 88 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilgisibragimov ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilgis_Ibragimov Now for my own thoughts: - It's interesting that the measurements are '10 minutes for the first scan, real time after that' - likely that high level math that I don't understand. Practical enough for real-world usage in my opinion. - It sounds like they're still working out materials engineering bugs to make it work across the whole range of temperatures, solvent conditions, etc. Not a small feat to make something resistant to almost everything. o For reference, our FBRM instrument uses Hastalloy C with a sapphire window (aluminum oxide); and our ReactIR uses a silicon window. Neither of these are compatible with acids or bases outright. - Seems like they're in beta testing with some users, though I'm not sure if they're looking to expand that at all. I will ask though and mention there are some people wanting to see how well it works before becoming early adopters. Question to the AMMRL list: would it be appropriate to give him a chance to answer questions directly on the AMMRL list? I don't think I should be the in-between here - he would know more about this than I would. Thanks & Regards, Norman Chu ________________________________ Norman Chu R & D Chemist Torcan Site Piramal Healthcare Limited<www.piramalpharmasolutions.com> 110 Industrial Parkway North Aurora, Ontario, Canada L4G 3H4 Direct +1 905 727 9417 x 327 norman.chu_at_piramal.com<mailto:norman.chu_at_piramal.com> [cid:image001.gif_at_01D20CCE.0C4217A0] ________________________________ This communication may contain information that is proprietary confidential or exempt from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient please note that any other dissemination distribution use or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Anyone who receives this message in error should notify the sender immediately by telephone or by return e-mail and delete it from his or her computer. From: NORMAN CHU/ Torcan/ Torcan-R&D/ Pharma Solution_Canada Sent: Friday, September 09, 2016 10:10 AM To: ammrl_at_ammrl.org Subject: New product: "Elegant NMR" in-situ NMR probe? Hi all, So I stumbled across http://www.elegant-nmr.com/ last night and it seems to be extremely new (not to mention that their website seems perpetually stuck in the 1990s</marquee >). I'm asking the AMMRL mailing list to see what the snake-oil factor is. For the supposed pre-order price of 500 euros it seems too good to be true. On the flip side the FAQ does seem to be fairly transparent and the Youtube videos have 'awkward academic/genius' all over it rather than sales-guy talk. I am going to email that company and ask for more details as well. The premise is that it's a small PTFE inerted in-situ NMR probe that you can insert directly into reaction mixtures, with (what appears to be) a hallbach array of neodymium magnets to make a ~1.2T, with 4 separate coils and some black-boxed algorithms to compensate for an inhomogenous magnetic field. It sounds hand-wavy but it's so different to our supercon magnets. Personally I've loosely followed the literature developments over the years and seen incremental progress in this direction, so permanent magnet low-field NMR I can believe. This really could take off if implemented correctly, though early-adopters will inevitably help shape future versions (by way of on-line process analytical technology). So what does AMMRL make of this? Snake oil? Believable? Thanks & Regards, Norman Chu ________________________________ Norman Chu R & D Chemist Torcan Site Piramal Healthcare Limited<www.piramalpharmasolutions.com> 110 Industrial Parkway North Aurora, Ontario, Canada L4G 3H4 Direct +1 905 727 9417 x 327 norman.chu_at_piramal.com<mailto:norman.chu_at_piramal.com> [cid:image001.gif_at_01D20CCE.0C4217A0] ________________________________ This communication may contain information that is proprietary confidential or exempt from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient please note that any other dissemination distribution use or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Anyone who receives this message in error should notify the sender immediately by telephone or by return e-mail and delete it from his or her computer.
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