Tony Davies Columns

Anaerobic digestion is a good solution to the joint problems of dealing with organic waste and producing “clean” energy. However, running the digesters at optimum performace is a complex business. NIR spectroscopy offers a solution to monitor a number of analytes within the reactor and in real time.

¹H NMR spectra are usually interpreted by hand, which is very time consuming, and can become a process bottleneck in fields such as high-throughput NMR. Greater automation of the spectral analysis process has become essential if NMR is to be of value as a high-throughput analytical method in the future.

Time for a good whinge (“complain persistently and in a peevish or irritating way”—Oxford Dictionaries Online) and to get a little controversial. Having had a year to look at the resources available to us to help educate our budding spectroscopists, I have been disappointed that much of the educational resources available online appear incomplete or outdated. For a generation of students brought up in schools with interactive whiteboards, good quality spectroscopic teaching materials of this nature are almost non-existent.

Analytical Information Mark-up Language, better known as AnIML, has been around as a concept for a number of years, but how does an analytical chemist use it in the real lab? A team of R&D scientists at LGC has been finding out.

Christmas is a time of giving and it is with great pleasure that we are able to report the news that Dr Michael Heise, a friend of many years both personally and of this column, has recently been awarded the title of Honorary Professor at the University of Applied Sciences of South-Westphalia in Iserlohn, Germany.¹ Mike has been regarded for a long time as an “Internationaler Experte für Infrarot-Spektroskopie”, as the Iserlohn University of Applied Sciences put it on their press release!

A.N. Davies,^a H.M. Heise^b and D.F. Ihrig^c

^aProfessor, SERC, University of Glamorgan, UK, Director, ALIS Ltd, and ALIS GmbH—Analytical Laboratory Informatics Solutions
^bISAS—Institute for Analytical Sciences at Dortmund University of Technology, Bunsen-Kirchhoff-Str. 11, D-44139 Dortmund, Germany
^cUniversity of Applied Sciences of South-Westphalia, Frauenstuhlweg 31, D-58644 Iserlohn, Germany

I would like to thank everybody who has taken the trouble to respond to my last column on Educating Spectroscopists.¹ I am very happy that Ian has allowed me space to reproduce some of them in this edition.

Now maybe I’m going to be a little controversial in this month’s column and I might just touch a nerve in the readership. If you are of a nervous disposition or are easily upset, this column may damage your health! However, I can’t stop worrying about the miss-match between what we teach undergraduate students about spectroscopy and what they will be expected to understand about our subject when they finally end up in gainful employment.

Back in 1999 we looked at the analysis of complex data sets in the field of Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS). These were no classical multi-dimensional files such as you would find in time-elapsed spectroscopy or multi-dimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometry—why?