Owlstone, based in Cambridge, have now sold their first few “Lonestar” Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometers and have also received a $3.4 million research contract to work with the US Threat reduction Agency and a $1.2 million contract with a UK based defence contractor to design and deliver a chemical warfare detector for use on the battlefield. When we saw sample machines at the current mtec show at the Birmingham NEC, we commented that they were a little larger than the chips we had been shown in 2005. Business development manager Chris Prior-Jones responded that they still used the same FAIMS chip, but, “Also need an XP computer” to analyse the data. Currently, he said, it is possible to identify, “Two or three” different chemical species simultaneously, or “Five or six” after passing the input stream through a chemical chromatograph to separate them sequentially. Cost of a single Lonestar machine is currently about £30,000.
Owlstone chip detector goes commercial
Chip based universal chemical analysers that were described in Eureka’s March 2005 edition have gone commercial
