SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will research and develop a universal carbon detector for liquid chromatography using flame ionization detection. The commercialization of this innovation is a product that will allow scientists to measure compounds with greater ease and accuracy, and drastically simplify the number and types of detectors required in liquid chromatography. The broader impacts of this product include faster drug and product development, more accurate purity analysis, better environmental sampling and more efficient research in many market sectors where liquid chromatography is used. The proposed activity will result in a product that competes in the $500M UV detector market, offering universal carbon detection without the need for a chromophore and linear detector response. The intellectual merit of this project is the development of a low-cost, universal detector that is capable of responding to nearly all organic molecules with high sensitivity and linearity. Previous attempts to utilize the flame ionization detector have failed because of the lack of technologies necessary for the complete vaporization of analytes and removal of organic solvents. We have identified an oxidation-reduction microreactor that converts all organic molecules to methane vapors. We anticipate the proposed detector will have a sensitivity on-par with flame ionization detectors in gas chromatography. The technology would bring unparalleled molecular quantification to a wide variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, biofuels, environmental testing, chemicals and foods.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the potential to directly and positively impact the speed of chemical analysis leading to cleaner and more advanced products. Technology resulting from the proposed activity will solve several pain points in the chemical analysis industry, including non-linearity, small dynamic range and variable, sometimes negligible, detector response. As a result, the technology will have broad use and lead to improved detection in pharmaceuticals, drug development, fuels, chemicals, renewables, foods, flavors, and academic and industrial research. Uniform response to carbon from flame ionization detection (FID) would be completely disruptive to the painstaking methods of calibration of known compounds and the guesswork associated with the quantification of unknowns. The benefits of this technology are expected to result in immense improvements in the speed and accuracy of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, thereby leading to better and safer products, with faster development times. Applied to the pharmaceutical and new drug development industry, this technology will have lasting impacts on the health and safety of society due to better and faster analyses available.This SBIR Phase II project aims to deliver a carbon selective detector (CSD) to the global scientific market. The CSD is a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) detector that produces a linear response to all organic compounds using a flame ionization detection (FID) and a catalytic reactor. The key innovation is the novel development and use of a catalytic reactor to transform organic molecules and remove solvent in liquid chromatograph effluent streams. The FID, similar to those ubiquitous in gas chromatography (GC) systems, yields a universal response to organic compounds converted to methane with unparalleled linear range and robustness. The device will overcome limitations of the FID that have prevented previous use in HPLC by selectively removing solvents, oxidizing organic compounds to carbon dioxide, reducing carbon dioxide to methane, and detecting the resulting methane with the FID. The resulting product features, most notably a universal response to carbon, will provide pre-clinical pharmaceutical researchers with a tool that can quantify drugs and their by-products during screening, long before the process has been scaled up for the production of calibration standards.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.