 point out a couple of hopefully obvious things but the first of all I wanted to point out that the talks and we appreciate everybody for coming out and talking but the the talks from all all of our speakers here are their talks and not ours and they don't represent the Commission and also similarly you'll see both in the from the talks and on the tour later those of you are able to take the tour various instrument from instruments from these various manufacturers it doesn't mean we endorse any of the particular companies that are speaking here that we have but just examples of the technology so anyway with that back to Matt. Alright this is going to start off our spectroscopy block and we'll start with Frank Higgins from Agilent Technologies. Hello everybody so I'm going to talk about handheld and portable FTIR applied to measuring phthalates and plastics so this has been an ongoing project for us we probably worked on this last year and some more this year but I'm an applications development scientist at Agilent we were formerly A2 Technologies and Agilent purchased us about what was it last March so I'm going to go through our products briefly and then I'm going to go into some of the experimentation that we've done so all of our instruments are made to be very rugged and they're all based on a central core engine which is our interferometer it's a Michelson interferometer and it has a maximum resolution of four-way no resolution and it's a full scanning the full mid infrared range it's non-hydroscopic optics so it can handle humidity and field applications and we have what we call our portable which are you know can be connected to a laptop and a power source or our fully portable version which has an on-board battery and operates off a PDA and we do have two handheld options one has a clip that attaches to your waist and the other is just the same design only all in one piece so the ExoScan is the one piece units about seven pounds it has interchangeable sampling interfaces our flex scan is four pounds the optical head and the rest again attaches to your waist and it's also PDA and that has dedicated sampling interfaces so these are some of the sampling interfaces that we have we have a liquids and solids single bounce ATR version we have metal coatings and surface cleanliness option which is our external reflectance we have a diffuse reflectance device that we use for our soils and rough rough metal surfaces and then we have our grazing angle for a very smooth flat shiny metals so we made the 4100 ExoScan to be handheld but also very versatile so if you want to set it up in a mobile lab or in your lab you can bring it and dock it to a docking station and it has a clamp that clamps down your unit and also a sampling pressure device for the ATR so for phthalates the challenge for infrared is to get enough path length with a handheld unit to be able to get down to the detection limits that we want and just to let you know if you're not familiar with FTIR all phthalates have similar functional groups so any phthalate that is in a plastic is going to have absorbance at 740 reciprocal wave numbers and if it's not a phthalate then it won't have absorbance there so that is what we're focusing on in much of the work I'm going to show you here is that 740 absorbance band so for our single reflection our path length is about two microns into the sample at 1700 weight numbers so this is great for a screening tool for solids and liquids we have about a 1% total phthalates detection limit now this can just use the pressure of the device the weight of the device onto a sample or you know simple finger pressure of the sample against the ATR I'll go into some other details about that a single bounce ATR device now our three reflection is very unique it has very high throughput which gives it an advantage as well as it has a higher path length so you're going three bounces into the the sample so that gives you about a six micron path length and our experiments have shown detection limit of quantitation actually a limit of quantitation of 0.1 percent the total phthalates and we also have a nine reflection option which we've shown to get down to 0.05 percent total phthalates and that has a path length of about 18 microns and it also has a flow cell option available I'll talk about that later but so this is a close-up of the three different devices the single reflection diamond the three reflection and the nine and you can see the the crystal sizes you know of course go up as you get more bounces but our three reflection is only nominally more than our single reflection just because of the design it's a dicomp diamond design so we get very high throughput and that just gives you better signal to noise when you're measuring samples like these and also it's not recessed so that that diamond is is slightly proud from the surface so it's very easy to make contact with you know pliable plastics or even hard plastics if they're bendable to make contact with that ATR our nine reflection you can see it's recessed so I'll talk about that later so our single reflection diamond on our exo scan is a rounded diamond so the infrared energy path is focused on the center of that diamond the advantage of this is it makes it very easy to get spectra very quickly and you don't have a large flat surface that you have to make contact with you just have to make contact with that small center place so again this is our diamond rounded ATR interface it's an interchangeable attachment or it can be dedicated on our exo scan this means that if you have a user that you don't want them to have the option of taking it off and on or misplacing it it's all in one unit it's dedicated for a purpose the interchangeable again you can change them out as you need and we have a fully handheld you know option for phthalates we have a method already developed for it so some future developments associated with this is we could develop a three-bounds diamond ATR exo scan attachment right now it's in our portable version only so we also have the option of optimizing an attachment for the the handheld exo scan that would focus on maximizing the number of bounces and the path thinks with the same contact area for the polymers which is important because if you have too big of a diamond even on an exo scan if you have to make contact with a concave or a curved portion of the sample it's best to have as small a crystal as you can so this is our first method that we did with these samples was on our nine-bounce diamond and it comes into configuration like you see up in the top corner but without that device it would be a flat diamond there but it you know it'd be like a lunchbox you could carry out to the field and major samples anywhere so the absorbance again at 1740 46 here exactly is the ortho aromatic functional group of phthalates so any ortho aromatic phthalates will give you absorbance there we have samples shown here at 0.24 and 0.6 total phthalates in the in these final samples and you can see our calibration curve there is very good and you know our detection our limit of quant is is also very good it's at about 0.05 percent no that's in the plastic just pressed onto the diamond I'll have a wider view of the spectrum here in a minute so this is a wider view so you can see some of the other bands in infrared spectra but I showed this slide to show our linear range capability so we don't have to just focus on very low levels we can quantitate all the way up into the high percentages which might be a problem for some you know LC preparations or GC preparations where if a sample is up around 50% phthalates well you might not want to inject it into your into your GC and again the calibration is very nice there so this is how we prepare the samples for the nine bounce you would have to take a cutout and then make a round punch we have a punch that's exact diameter that you need and then you simply press that with finger pressure to the diamond and you can get down to 0.05 percent again there's no solvents it's it's very simple but you know a lot of people don't want to destroy a sample and you know this might be a little bit too much sample prep for a non-technical user so we're trying to to fix that with our three bounce so this is the quant the same same samples done with the three bounce diamond ATR and the the di octal adipate plasticizer so these are 0.24 and 0.6 and again you can see we get a very good response and these just require touching any area of the sample to the diamond and this is the calibration again for this and this is just finger pressure we don't need a press to do this and this is in dents the same concentrations that were provided by by Matt a year ago or so and that's the calibration for dents so this is just the technique you know the diamond is prowled from the surface enough so that if you press it against the metal the diamond will be the first thing that contacts the sample so it really makes it an ideal way to measure these it's available on the portable or the the actual you know lunch lunchbox type a device the cons again the sample needs to be pressed flat on the diamond if it's not completely on the diamond like or if you hit one of these letters and it's not completely flush well your analysis might not be as accurate so we would always recommend measuring in multiple areas of a sample to make sure that you know you get a good average so we also wanted to go another route where we did a solvent extraction and show you know our ability to be a screening tool in that way and we this way we can get down to lower levels of detection but we also have the benefit of of having a big average of a whole sample so you can grind up a sample extracted just like you do for the GC method and analyze that THF directly by FTIR and and you would get the average of a whole sample so that some people would prefer that so we have two ways to do this this is our tumbler or dial path technology and you see the infrared beam path which goes to two zinc solenoid crystals that are matched they're concave so this prevents any spectral anomalies due to internal reflections and it really has a very low you know limits of quantitation because our signal to noise is very high in this instrument it it's very close to the full-size FTIR benches mainly because you're focusing you know all that interferometer into a small light path so you get you know less divergence of the infrared beam and we just get a really high throughput with this and for this application it would be a custom path length our standard path lengths are 50 100 or 200 microns but we can go as high as 1000 microns to analyze liquids and you can look for places in solvents that there's no interference from the you know from the solvent with the analyte and that's the case with THF this is just an example of how you open and close the tumbler cell so it's very quick to clean and very easy to use and this is our THF extraction experiments where we we looked at phthalates spiked into THF and we also did some extractions and found that it worked very well this was done at 500 microns but we can go up to a thousand and still get very good data and again you know you can concentrate the sample and then run it as a concentrated you know as you evaporate the THF then you could run it and get even lower detection limits another thing that our software allows us to do is to do conditional reporting now this allows us to use multiple calibrations to produce one prediction so we can have a low calibration a mid and a high and based on the conditions the logic that you put in the end of the software it will use the appropriate calibration to give you the the best accuracy and the best precision and we also have the ability to set up a condition type matrix here like you see where this is for birds nest soup actually which is a another story all together but we wanted to set up conditions for the amount of sugar msg carbonate in in these products and it's just we put limits on the absorption for these bands and we put them in our software and then it gives us one result either the result would be it may contain sucrose or it may contain feathers so all these different conditions can be used in our software and you can set that up for phthalates so that if you have polyethylene or polypropylene or PVC you can set up these conditions for those bands that you know will be there and it will use the appropriate calibration depending on the matrix so just to conclude the three-bounce ATR is capable of point one percent in vinyl plastic toys for phthalates these are non-destructive techniques and our nine bounce can do the point oh five percent total phthalates the portable exo scan can measure down to one percent and this is all just pressing the sample to the ATR our solvent extraction technique can get down to the similar point one or point oh five detection limits and even lower if we concentrated the sample and then our advanced software conditional reporting allows multiple calibrations so thank you a few questions okay are you restricted to only non aromatic no the DOTP or the phthalates they don't have the same ortho aromatic band so in infrared you know your aromatic substitution changes the frequencies of those bands so the answer is yes we can we can calibrate to samples that have other plasticizers that are not denture DOA those are just examples yeah yeah next we have Steve Polans from regaku thanks for having me man thank you all I'm just going to do a basic introduction to Raman spectroscopy for use in measuring phthalates I haven't done really any studies I have no good data to show you I'm gonna talk about our company and a relationship well my company based back in a relationship with regaku and what the future holds and what kind of capabilities you will have in your hand you know with these with these Raman spectrometers so we have base back is my company and we are located in San Jose our core technology is it we make the diffraction gradings you know we are the world leader in miniaturization of spectral engines so in telecom in the past couple years we've gone out into the spectroscopy market and as of the fourth quarter last year regaku has built a company regaki Raman technologies which is taking our product line and they're much much bigger company he's 1100 versus 25 so we'll be able to we'll be developing these applications in the very near future what's nice about the the Raman spectrometer and our spectrometers is we make this VPG we call it the volume phase grading so there are no moving parts is very very rugged spectrograph you know it's got all the usual a thermal design and the enabling technologies come from telecom which is where our heritage lies you know miniaturization of lasers we see next is the diffraction grading sensors processing power I show down here a few of these little spectrometers these are these are fully functional Raman spectrometers that are run by it with an iPhone app and they are about this big and we just finished developing one half is half the size so I don't know how many of you are very familiar with Raman spectroscopy I'm gonna give a little brief introduction so basically what you do is you shine the laser on a sample most of the light coming back is just at the same wavelength you know it's Raleigh scattered but about one in a million photons is scattered in elastically it can either gain or lose energy to to the sample by you know one basically unit of vibrational frequency in the molecule so you know signal strength goes as one over the laser power to laser the fourth power and what's really nice about Raman is there's a very high degree of chemical specificity and you will see that in a few example spectra that I show you there's no sample preparation you can measure through containers usually you know that makes it very nice and it's immune to the presence of water there's you will not see a water interference in a Raman spectrum and this a lot of you especially the IR folks are very familiar with these tables you know we're talking organic bonds you know each has a characteristic frequency in particular interests to us are the the carbon oxygen double bond stretch and the and the the phenyl ring stretching however the downside in what's been limiting the use of Raman spectroscopy in screening you know plastics for recycling or phthalates and such is the fluorescence issue because this this technique is complimentary with FTIR but it goes about it in a completely different way you know we are shining you know say visible light onto a sample and getting back another visible photon that is just shifted by the vibrational frequency and when you're operating you know in the visible wavelength range you have the chance of absorption and fluorescence and historically fluorescence has been the the you know big big setback to using Raman spectroscopy you know to measure you know colored plastics for instance because as you I've shown here about one in a million photons scatters inelastically you know fluorescence just absorption and fluorescence you know we're talking one to one type relationship between input and output so what that's telling us is a part per million levels of impurities you know dies for instance not an impurity but low low low concentrations of fluorophores will compete with the Raman signal so you know you know your UV vis absorption spectrum you know the longer you go the longer wavelengths you go the less likelihood there is of absorption of the laser by the material especially you start getting out of the visible away from these colors of these dies so historically you know Raman spectroscopy has you know been a big benchtop system you know early days of 514 you know that's an argon ion laser it might be six feet long on its own but you know 532 the shorter the wavelength the stronger the signal but the more likelihood you will absorb the laser and fluoresce in mask the Raman signal you know so set moving to 785 nanometers was a big revolution in Raman spectroscopy I open up you know many more materials to be measured but that's still deep red there's still a lot of absorption so based on our expertise in the telecom we use 1064 nanometers so just you know just outside the visible and then in the near infrared wavelength range that further reduces fluorescence that's a big advantage because I can now measure a lot of colored plastics in just ID the plastic material you know because you know the downside of Raman is it it doesn't detect very low levels but that makes it immune to detecting things like dies and impurities so here's one example I know it's a pharmaceutical that's kind of where I've been working a lot but this is just just to show you kind of what people used to have to used to see when they use Raman spectroscopy on a colored sample this blue curve is a nice fluorescence emission curve from the coating on this pill when you turn around it and go from 785 to 1064 you see right through that coating into the pill and you can see the caffeine and acetaminophen and aspirin in there and as I mentioned before Raman has a similar to FTIR has a very high degree of chemical specificity and that's going to play a very important role in detecting phthalates because we also detect the plastics so here I just pulled an old picture kind of showing the kind of features from this you know the same polymer polystyrene that you would see in an FTIR spectrum and then down below you see in the Raman spectrum quite a few features make that spectrum very unique to that material you know and then compared to near IR which you know is OAT measures overtones and you need to use some chemometrics to extract the chemical information so this is the extent of my experience measuring phthalates and that was out here last fall in your lab you spend a little time but I take the you know we took the pure materials measure them with our 1064 and I just overlay this overlaid the spectra and you see we've got one of these adipates and then these phthalates and you see there is more than enough information in these spectra to distinguish all of these materials you know and then I have a you know the standard PVC with the DOA and then one with the phthalate and you overlay them and you can see the difference it's just it's PVC a lot of these the common bands are the PVC vibrational modes and then in particular here is that's a telltale indicator that there's a phthalate present in the plastic you know and then the other one down there is is the benzene ring and you know traditionally too the normal Raman spectroscopy you know you rule a thumb you could detect down to half a percent one percent but that's a rule of thumb and this phthalate band especially the one here around a thousand wave numbers is so strong that you know I haven't undertaken the study as of yet but you know I'm convinced that we can do point one percent so this would be a you know it's a point-and-shoot type of screening tool for detecting phthalates and much like FTIR you can do automated library searching you know for instance I can build a library of these materials and library of plastics with various levels of additives and distinguish them for you know this is just one example I did a collected a spectrum of a plastic soda bottle perform an automated library search all of this everything I talk about the data processing all that is integrated into this little this little device and so the best match from the library is is PET you know I already knew the answer but it's nice to have confirmation so onto the marketing side so this is a these are the types of different sizes shapes products we make we've got this first guard and you know this is the world's first 1064 near infrared ramen spectrometer in your hand use point pull a trigger you know it will do the search report a result then we've got these other form factors and so on the xanthas one over there is essentially a little bench top instrument it's battery powered or you can plug in AC they all have the same capabilities and this should you know we have a lot of accessories for you can invert them in stands and things like that and some more bench tops we make microscopes so so if you want to visit the regaku booth at pitcon we're going to have some very novel ramen instruments coming coming out where they have dual wavelengths and then this is where I get excited because I like build instruments so we've got a couple of next-generation systems coming you know in under development that'd be interest to you know people such as yourselves measuring colored plastics you know it's trying to see past the fluorescence one of them it's it's sitting here I took a picture of the of this it's called shifted excitation from a different spectroscopy and you know this is here's the here's the instrument right here and it has two late two seven eighty five lasers that are just slightly shifted in frequency so when you measure two spectra it's hard to see here but there are two overlying curves they're slightly shifted but they have the concept is that the fluorescence curve is virtually the same because you're going up into the same absorption manifold and fluorescing back down but the ramen peaks are all relative to the laser wavelength so they shift a little bit and so you just do a subtraction you get a derivative spectrum then you can reconstruct the the spectrum of the material underneath the fluorescence there's another pretty neat instrument we're building based on spatially offset ramen spectroscopy normal ramen you're just kind of hitting a diffuse material and looking at back scatter through the same set of optics what spatially offset ramen allows you to do is depth profile and you can see through opaque packaging it's very interesting and we're building the first one right now I think I titled this cutting-edge technology in the palm of your hand but then I saw it on the bench undergoing alignment and it's about this big right now but a couple generations it'll be it'll be into a form factor like this no doubt I think that's that's it any questions okay we have one more talk this afternoon by Michael Gray from thermo just page down okay good afternoon my name is Michael Gray and I'm with Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation working out of Bill Rickham Massachusetts specifically in the area that we call portable analytical instruments just briefly what that means in in our company is the thermo scientific of Thermo Fisher scientific course a very large company with conglomeration of many divisions our division specifically handles portable analytical instrumentation made up of what was traditionally the NITON brand of XRF analyzers and two years ago or a year and a half ago we acquired Ohura scientific and polychromics in the basically the IR space with with mid IR near IR and Rahman instrumentation so what we wanted to talk about today was using a portable FTI our system for detection of phthalates it's a little bit different how we look at this we come from this as a major supplier of portable analytical instrumentation into this industry for lead detection right we're the number one by far and away the number one supplier of portable analytic portable XRF spectroscopy instruments for lead detection cadmium detection other heavy metals so coming from that perspective when we acquired Ohura scientific some years ago we decided to that would be our first bridge product of the two new groups so that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit here we do not have a product to offer for sale it's not quite done yet I'll get into why but we've done some very good pilot work with a handful of our specific customers and I just wanted to share with with everyone where we are in that product roadmap we're very committed to this business so we want to we really would want to have a phthalate solution to be a total solutions provider so from our perspective I'm looking at what the real problem is out in the market place right so the regulatory levels are 0.1 percent thousand PPM however for the most part what you'll see in a PVC plasticized material is we see generally things you know certainly over 15 20 25 percent up to 50 percent very like the the world of lead there's a regulatory limit and then there's a practical usage factor and we usually operate in that practically usage area that's how we've always done it in XRF and we would be taking the same approach to this marketplace certainly the substitute plasticizer more expensive we all know right the problem the problem that exists out there much like the I'll use those analogies again and again that the substitutes of lead bismuth and titanium and other things are expensive as well it can be at half percent in some plastics you know you've got the contamination issue in the recycle issue so we recognize those issues as well and for these reasons there's really no real analytical technique that can do it and what I say can't do any analytical technique portable analytical technique I'm thinking on the standard of the XRF that simple red screen green screen you've got lead you don't have lead people are looking for the same kind of an answer at our level of the market end user level looking for that same kind of do you have a thallid or don't you have a thallid so for the manufacturers of course it comes down to that this is what they look at every day the manufacturers who are our customers right primarily in the XRF world we're looking at manufacturers of footwear and apparel and toys and various consumer products and they see these concentrations in very high rates we know that the substitute materials are very expensive so they've always got to be on watch that the that the products are made to the specifications they've agreed so we know that GCMS is the standard tool we heard a lot about it today right it's a laboratory tool that's one of the first things we look at is trying to get things out of the laboratory the need for preparation certainly our entire industry our entire industry of portable analytical instruments is generally built on the not needing to do sample preparation right not just the convenience but of course the access to non-technical users the less variability in the process so not having to do sample prep is a core part of our business proposition and everything we do now this time is generally about a day but you've got to send samples someone third party is doing it so it's always convenient to have your own analysis technique and of course as we've heard before it's a trace analysis technique so if you get these very high concentrations you'll want to dilute them before injecting them into your lab instruments so these are some of the things that drive us to say that there's probably another solution required in the marketplace in addition to this I it's certainly hard to believe lab testing will ever go away we need third-party testing people have to make sure that these things are really really quantified what's in them but much like we've done in the world of lead testing which we've never displaced lab testing there either we certainly have a compelling solution for people to do their own everyday testing and quality control so just a bit about FTR we've seen a lot about I didn't realize we'd be talking about a couple of sessions before me so we've all we've all seen a lot more detailed spectrum already but here it is again right it's very obvious the peaks we can see these phthalates they're very clear and an infrared spectrometer so this is the basis of what we work on it is a traditional laboratory technique it's been around a long time right it's well understood it's well understood to our people so not a low low not a lot of high risk in the process for a standard FTR the limited detection is in the percent range for us so there are some novel techniques that the folks at A2 are doing we're sticking to kind of a more basic sort of percent range detection as a real screening tool so it's really useful for that screening at the at the manufacturer level in their supply chain so just some background on how all this happened I said briefly in the beginning so of course the under HR 2715 CPSIA we've got guidance for phthalate constant content of 0.1% so we all know what it is once we had sort of that data in our heads we had this acquisition of a horror scientific which added the portable FTR to our night time suite of instruments so in trying to decide how to integrate the two groups we all we knew that this portable instrumentation we would become the repository of all portable acquisitions or developments within the company how did we add these two together and this was the first joint project we came to it was an as an ideal project because they had an existing product which you see the picture of here called the true defender FT and that was designed for Homeland Security applications quite different from this but it is basic FTIR and it shared a lot of the basic requirements that we had simple operation easy to use by anyone non-technical people simple interface so we thought this would be a good opportunity with our background in this in this regulatory space and the horror scientific product having that FTIR background we thought it would be a great place to bridge over and that's indeed what we did so what we did was we took that product the true defender FT that you see here and we we sort of did some modification to it we rebranded it as a night on so just a little explanation of what that means thermo Fisher scientific corporation is really just a corporation all products come under the Fisher scientific brand or the thermo scientific brand so as equipment we're part of thermo scientific and the night on product is really a product name and that's what it is because historically the night on company was a real brand standard for portable XRF so now we've brought that out to be sort of the the brand name within our company for these for these portable solutions so we put a night on name on it because that's what people in this business will recognize that's what manufacturers of apparel and footwear and toys and consumer products recognize the good news on this was they had about 4,000 of these things in the field already all through mostly through Homeland Security but through some other application as well so the physical system was very very well designed well tested and very low risk and and of course then coming in and adding it to the night on group under the night on name where we are sort of the standard for CPS I am prop 65 reach compliance tools the existing or product to true defender was then developed and pilot tested under the name night on FT and so a little bit about that so we went out and we did our pilot we did a market requirements analysis we call it within our company VOC voice of customer study so we did a study a market analysis developed a specification modified the system somewhat and then went out to six pilot customers and let them run with it for a couple of weeks and to live up a lot of data in some cases we had labs involves we got some good GCMS correlation and so what we found were a few things the specules specification for the regulatory limit is point one percent we're really going to talk about the one percent range comfortably depending on matrix you really at about the one percent range again screening tool we discussed the issue of recycling and contamination but generally speaking at the end user level they're really looking for that screening tool to keep their manufacturers honest that's what they've always done with the XRF and it's very similar to that the specification from the market was the ability to analyze all plastics all different types of plastics all different hardnesses of plastics so in the beginning we used to we used to do this by XRF analysis and say if it didn't have chlorine it's not PVC it's probably not plasticized well that didn't last very long I mean that really wasn't a logical way to go forward so we really do need to analyze the broad range materials what we're finding is under our ATR it's pretty flexible we can get most materials to make contact only the really very hard plastics can still be a bit of a challenge and we have various sample prep techniques to get past that just briefly I'll show you what this tool looks like this is it it's just one one piece in your hand and we put this thing we call the anvil just to get that pressure against the diamond ATR so you can put the sample inside and clamp it down and that's how you get the pressure and we find that that's plenty of pressure to get all but the very very hard plastics which generally aren't going to be a phthalate issue anyway also one of the specification we've developed was the detection and speciation of all phthalates right distinguishing band phthalates from good phthalates and so on our system is not going to do that we chose an algorithmic approach that we proud we will not have on our path speciation of any type we'll just tell you if it's a grouping of phthalates but I'll go back again analogously our customers in the XRF world they don't play around with legal limits of lead they want no lead right they just want to see if there's lead or no lead because they want no lead so in the same way we're saying we'll just tell you if there's phthalates and if it's not banned today it might be banned soon you might as well just not have phthalates and use alternative plasticizers but we will not be able to distinguish those phthalates the fit form and function specification really the spec really was our portable XRF it's it's really well adopted people like it very much they like the physical package and they wanted it to be as similar to that as possible things like simple startup ease of use any user can can can use it long battery life transportability I think did we have the these come in a small pelican case much like our XRF so you can just put it in a bag take it and go long battery life so these are the kinds of things that people wanted in this tool as well and it certainly has all of those those aspects simple go no go or pass fail like the handled XRF no spectroscopist required so there's some really I mean really the core contribution of this thing beyond just the physical package is the chemometrics techniques that allow for no spectroscopist that really can get us to a go no go pass fail and our algorithm we believe certainly has the legs to get there and we're still developing to get to that final stage but we do believe we will give them that simple red screen green screen that they're looking for so few things about the FT and its pilot some of the good news it is a phthalate screening in a handheld form factor that will give a red green I mean that is what it's ultimately going to do you can see we're putting it out of pocket here it's really a nice convenient simple to use package okay it meets all of our voice of customer requirements for that ease of use and and even for performance it has a simple interface that anybody can use it does not you do not have to be an educated spectroscopist or or a scientist any user can can get the benefit of the machine it's very rugged and it's designed to a military specification because of its homeland security history it's designed to mil-spec it mean drop from three feet on the concrete it can be dunked into a solution of chlorine bleach for cleaning and decontaminating so it's got a very very robust physical package it's got all the performance of a lab system we say at least a you know qualitative screening technique in a two and a half pound package that you can carry around literally almost in your pocket okay and more importantly the physics work quite reliably that was the main thing so when we talk about our screening operation the main thing we were concerned with is does the spectroscopy work and it does it works quite well and we see that all the time it detects these satellites quite regularly challenges in the system yet to go we definitely do need some more algorithm work I say the physics works but in many cases we're not detecting it's ally when we open the spectrum we see it in there it's very obvious but somehow the algorithm isn't always picking it up and there's a little bit of background on that the reason for that is we really went into this with a spectral matching program a spectrum matching algorithm from from what our customers are really looking for analogous to what we've done in lead detection they really would want to see something more like a simple peak identification but instead of shifting we were thinking to shift over and just give a simple peak ID because the peaks are so obvious but then what we found was that people really want on the path if it's going to be an IR system an FTI our system they really want to have at some point that capability of material identification of the base polymer so we decided we would try to get the best of both so we're going to we're working off of the spectral match algorithm so that we can do a full spectral match and that we can as I said earlier we can build these libraries they're very simple to build there's a service offered to the Homeland Security Service where every time they find a new material out there that's not in the library on a 24-7 basis they email that back and a spectroscopist looks at it and out and absorbs it into the library and we can do the same thing in this market for these customers as well so we have to develop that algorithm further but but but the algorithm we're going to develop off of has a lot of has has a lot of extensibility to it and the final thing is that phthalate image is very clear in the spectrum but we must detect that the clear message from the customers was 85 percent or more at the end user level at the factory in the supply chain if they can't 85 percent at the time identify the polymer and identify whether or not it's got a phthalate then that's that's not a usable spec and we're not just not quite there but that's the algorithm development we're doing to get to that number we know that number and we're working toward it and this algorithm wasn't specifically written for phthalates of course as I said we're we're developing it into this marketplace there would be a simpler algorithm that would make it work but we've opted not to do that because we want to have future possibility so again here was just that again that spectrum you can see it I mean we've we've seen these in a number of other presentations it's just really really clear if you look at that base PVC and then you look at all the various phthalates it this is what we're talking about even when the machine doesn't miss you open up the spectrum you see it it's right there so we know we can get there so summary the need is still developing the market right I mean it's it's it hasn't even peaked yet the the final determination in the law was really just last summer and in 2011 was the first year where 60-day notices for phthalates surpassed lead right and it actually doubled them by the end of the year so that was really interesting so phthalates are certainly getting to be a hotter subject and more than anything else the portable solution is the only chance for statistically meaningful testing so we have to have lab testing we have to certify our product we have to know what's good but at the same time to get any sort of statistically meaningful testing because of the cost and difficulty of GCMS we don't have some sort of portable system out through the supply chain people are running totally blind and they're going to continue to do so so we think it's very compelling that people need this solution so we're determined to to offer it to them this product has existed in its physical form for three years so it's it's again 4,000 of them in the field so it's pretty low risk from our from our standpoint our pilot showed again that we need more algorithm work we've got to get that algorithm up to the standard the 85% identification rates we need better pass-fail functionality it's not quite red green screen green screen yet red screen green screen yet and the ability to rule run most of the common materials even if we have some limits on hard plastics but I think we've already achieved that one through the through this portable anvil device that we have and then of course we have a solid fit form and function and good solid physics right in the end of the day that's the most important thing for our customers at the supply chain level the customer does physics work quite reliably so that I thank you and I thank you Matt for having us here and any any specific questions no questions yes so who are scientific had I the it's around 4,000 units sold at the point we acquired them mostly but mostly it's bomb making materials and and and specific illicit drugs there is another application they call pharma chem which is which is various industrial applications the most notable of them being material ID for pharmaceutical companies looking for certain so as you can imagine it the spectrum actually worked well in those markets like bomb making materials there's only there's a very small universe of things people use to make bombs so it's easy for the Homeland Security guys to point shoot into some powder and figure out what the heck it is and it's very reliable for that and with the constant building of the library it really makes it ideal so that's the history thank you very much what we're going to do now is take a quick five minute break we're going to break down and set up for the discussion panel and we can convene