In this “Tutorial Tuesday” clip, Peter Larkin, who is a Manager of Spectroscopy, Thermal Analysis, and Chromatography at Syensqo, highlights how people use the method or technique that they are comfortable with, even if it’s not the best one to use.
In this “Tutorial Tuesday” clip, Peter Larkin, who is a Manager of Spectroscopy, Thermal Analysis, and Chromatography at Syensqo, highlights how people use the method or technique that they are comfortable with, even if it’s not the best one to use. Instead, Larkin explains how despite encountering instances where using
Below is a transcript of Larkin’s remarks, which address why analytical chemists don’t necessarily know when to use IR spectroscopy. His comments were part of a longer panel discussion, which can be
Peter Larkin: Even in many organizations, unless you have an experienced analytical chemist, which in my world are worth their weight in gold, they don't necessarily understand when to use IR and when to use other techniques. Everybody goes through their favorite toolbox and their favorite tool, but it's not necessarily the best tool. I'd put it that simply.
So we had a problem come in, and at the end of the day, it was 2-ethylhexyl tails. Any time you see tails, you immediately think it's going to be a number of things. And it was for a registration document, and we had to do an analysis for it. That means it can't be above one percent. However, this was from another vendor. It's actually a formulation.
The person that was coordinating this was an NMR spectroscopist. They did NMR. And there were an awful lot of peaks telling it was a complex formulation. This is a great application for infrared (IR) spectroscopy. You could just quickly do a library search. In this case, you could quickly just look at it by eye if you had training and say, "It's got this, this, and this, and about how much."
