It is now 2020 and there are few reasons remaining to be carrying out important work using an old instrument with less computing power than a cell phone. Now is the time to upgrade, leaving complicated analyses to software and freeing up more time to focus on what’s important – the results.
The Thermo Scientific™ Nicolet™ Summit FTIR Spectrometer is a simple-to-use but advanced instrument. It is able to save time in the lab in many intelligent ways, including the Smart Background feature.
Smart Background is a proprietary technology that is able to cut analysis time in half through the complete removal of the background collection step from the workflow. It automatically ensures that the most recent, accurate background is available for the specific instrument, even when it isn’t in use.
When Smart Background is turned on, a fresh set of backgrounds will be collected by the instrument to establish a “reference bucket” of spectra. Once this has been completed, the Lightbar will pulse blue, indicating that the instrument is continually taking new background scans. A comparison is instantly made between each new background scan and the reference bucket. The oldest scan is removed from the bucket if the new scan is similar to the reference bucket. The new one will then be added in.
This rolling process ensures the background is up to date and accurate. If the new background scan and the reference bucket scans are dissimilar (i.e., the instrument is bumped or a sample placed on the ATR crystal), then the new scan is automatically rejected. An illustration of the process is shown in the figure.
The caliber of work should match the caliber of the instruments being used. With features like Smart Background, the Thermo Scientific Nicolet Summit FTIR Spectrometer makes important work more efficient than ever before.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by Thermo Fisher Scientific – Materials & Structural Analysis.
For more information on this source, please visit Thermo Fisher Scientific – Materials & Structural Analysis.