News
BUSINESS PROFILE Viking Instruments finds success in a declining market "Instrument companies in the environmental business are not seeing the glory years they used to see," says Jeff Christenson, director of marketing for Viking Instruments. Even so, Viking is seeing an uplift in its environmental business because of an increased demand for analytical capability that can be used outside traditional laboratory settings. Viking's success has been assisted in part by the EPA's Environmental Technology Verification program, which is promoting the use of costeffective field analytical technologies. "While the environmental market has been flat or declining for many laboratory instrument manufacturers it is still important for us In addition we've diversified into other areas such as forensics and process analytics " Christenson said
Viking specializes in portable GC/MS systems, known as SpectraTrak, which have been extensively involved in the detection and identification of chemical warfare agents. "We have systems that are in use at Aberdeen Proving Ground and with the U.S. Army Technical Escort Unit," explains Christenson. As part of the chemical demilitarization program to eliminate existing stockpiles of chemical warfare agents, Viking built a special system the MMD1, which could be used on a mobile vehicle. "We take these substances that are buried or stockpiled, and our instrument characterizes exactly what they are " Once identified tiie toxic agents can be transformed into harmless substances Another area of involvement is that of treaty compliance. The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) allows surprise inspections or challenge inspections. The
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Wyoming Memorandum of Understanding has mandated that portable GC/MS be the technique used for doing these inspections. "We are in contention for some of that business," says Christenson. "The chemical industry is very proprietary; they are very protective about all their processes and products. They were worried that [CWC inspectors] could come into their plants and figure out their secrets," emphasizes Christenson. "So we and NISTare providing software that blinds the operator. If there is a match for a chemical agent, it tells you that; it doesn't tell you anything else. The operator never sees a mass spectrum; they never see anything. They can't take any magnetic medium with them, so they can't put information on afloppyand stick it in their pocket and sell it." Also along the lines of emergency response and civil defense, the Viking GC/MS instruments have been used by the Japanese in response to chemical spills caused by earthquakes, as well as in the Sarin attacks on the Tokyo subways. At the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, U.S. government agencies had Viking systems ready to be used in the event of a chemical terrorist attack. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has used Viking's portable GC/MS systems for drug tracking and drug trafficking. One incident involved a ship that had been tracked internationally. "They impounded the vessel but could not find anything. The dogs couldn't smell anything," remarks Christenson. "The whole shipping cargo vessel was full of PVC pipes. On a hunch, they abraded the surface, took a swab and
GC/MS system chauffered to a site.
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, January 1, 1998
some solvent, did an injection into the GC/MS, and found cocaine. The cocaine had been embedded in a polymer matrix with the idea of bringing it here where they had a plant set up to reclaim it" Viking has several SpectraTrak systems in key U.S. customs port areas. "There are all kinds of tricks that exporters do as far as mislabeling and misrepresenting products to get around different tariff restrictions," explains Christenson. Portable GC/MS systems are commonly used to investigate tankers full of petroleum or gasoline. Each country produces oil with a unique signature that can be detected by GC/MS, making it pretty straightforward to determine the country of origin. "A tanker had come in saying it was Venezuelan crude oil; it was not. U.S. Customs could tell because of certain characteristics about the relative composition of different hydrocarbons" In addition to portable GC/MS systems, Viking has also been involved in a joint venture with Imperial Oil of Canada to develop an online process GC/MS system for use in the refinery industry. "This is a huge system," remarks Christenson. It is unique in that it uses a multivariate partial least-squares algorithm that, in addition to providing the chemical composition, gives other properties such as cetane number, cetane index, cloud point, flash point, conductivity, viscosity, and density. "You can't look at a mass spectrum that points to these properties, but the whole spectrum contains information. It's not explicit like the height of a GC peak but the information that makes these properties what they is latently contained in their ensemble of data" says Christenson According to Christenson, a lot of the process world still uses relatively simple tools to analyze their process streams. "I think a lot of instrument manufacturers have seen potentially big opportunities for putting analytical technology that is normally found in a research laboratory into a process lab. They've tried to develop them, but when they introduce them to the people actually working in the process, they don't really fit" He says that Viking could have never developed the online process system without teaming with Imperial Oil, because they know their own problems better than anyone else. Britt Erickson
