In business some many years before passage of the SBIR enabling legislation, but an early - and now long-time SBIR-STTR awardee - Aerodyne Research Inc (ARI) is an R&D operation working in the space of advanced sensor and software products for a client base that includes industrial, academic and government customers. Areas of developed expertise include monitoring and enhancement of regional and global environmental quality; the development of clean and efficient energy and propulsion technologies; and the advancement of remote sensing, surveillance and image processing capabilities for national defense purposes. ARI scientists and engineers have been responsible for development of advanced measurement instruments and systems for Aerosol Mass Spectrometers including the Aerodyne Aerosol Mass Spectrometer or AMS, an open source, highly flexible and fully supported data analysis and acquisition software that can be adapted for individual customer needs and capable of providing quantitative size and chemical mass loading information in real-time for non-refractory sub-micron aerosol particles. The Aerodyne AMS has been deployed worldwide at fixed sites and on mobile laboratory, ship and aircraft platforms. In addition, over 100 instruments are in use in industrial, academic and government laboratories. The firm has also developed the Aerodyne Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM), which measures particle mass loading and chemical composition in real-time for non-refractory sub-micron aerosol particles. The ACSM is a smaller, lower cost, more robust option than the AMS and has been designed for long-term unattended deployment and routine monitoring applications. Other products developed by Aerodyne include the Chemical Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (ToF-CIMS) that combines chemical ionization with high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry for sensitive, real-time identification and quantification of gas-phase compounds in sampled air. The Tof-CIMS offers custom post-processing software available with functionality for high-resolution peak fitting, identification of unknowns and quantitative analysis of specific ions or classes of ions across long timescales.
