Emergence of the Field- Portable Instrumentation Market

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With the availability of a wide range of field-portable instrumentation the market for them is slowly but surely emerging. This approach is quietly getting accepted as it has made possible performing high-quality and rapid analyses at the site of investigation itself. There is off course much ramifications in the nature of business and logistics involved before a lab becomes truly portable. Before we go further in discussing the challenges of field- portable instrumentation it would be prudent enough to understand what is exactly a field-portable instrumentation

What is Field-Portable Instrumentation?
Field Portable Instrument

The answer is it refers to the instruments which is fast, lightweight, small enough to carry, functions on a simple infrastructure and lastly, is adept in generating laboratory quality data. Each of these factors is crucial.

To cite an example, say an environmental laboratory conducts on site analyses. The objective of such analysis using field- portable instrument is that it should be capable of generating effective data. This translates into the fact that the data quality generated should accomplish the data quality objectives (DQOs) of the project. If it fails in this endeavour then there is no use of it Some of the categories of instruments which falls under the ambit of field-portable instruments include the follwing.

Gas chromatographs(GCs) and micro-GCs,
Mass spectrometers(MS)
Continuous flame ionization detectors (FIDs)
Photoionization detectors(PIDs)
Extractive Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers
Filter-based and other infrared (IR) spectrometers
Xray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometers
Selective monitors
Hand-held Raman Spectrometer to be used for organic solids and liquids

Application of Field-Portable Instrumentation
It is the environmental laboratories which have the maximum oppoutunity for applying field analyses. Some of the core areas where there is utilisation of Field-Portable Instrumentation includes the following.

Health and safety/industrial hygiene.
Source/process monitoring
Brownfields
Odor investigations
Site characterization remediation
Fence line monitoring
Emergency response situations.

Future of Field-Portable Analysis
Industry pundits forecast a a wide range of applications for field-portable analysis, especially in the environmental industry. This expectation is fostered by the ability to get results as good as or sometimes even better than a fixed lab along with a strong evidence that the field- portable instruments are offering fast and effective analytical support.

Users of these instruments must be able to make quick decisions based on dependable and representative data.

From the perspective of an environmental laboratory. The field-portable instrumentation has seen good consolidation. This has resulted that the market is quite competitive with no single player having a major pie. There are still a number of factors which poses a challenge to the advantages of field-portable analytical approaches getting recognised. This factors are acceptance of field analytical data, regulatory issues and reference methods. However, these issues are getting resolved with field analytical professionals putting sustained efforts to remove the hurdles.

To conclude labs will have to latch on to the bus to field lab or watch this potential roll over them, as in the coming days all the projects are going to continue to shift towards field analysis.