Product Review
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fter more than two decades, the ion chromatography (IC) market appears to be as strong as ever, bringing in approximately $165 million in 1998. But other techniques, most notably capillary electrophoresis (CE), are vying for this lucrative market. Are IC manufacturers worried? Analytical Chemistry yontacted several lo them tt find out their position on ion analysis and how IC is faring in the face of competition A summary of representative commercially available IC systems is given in Table 1 Although this review is not comrjrehensive it aims at providine' a snapshot view of what's r , i n .pn4-i v
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Manufacturers continue to battle over suppression technology.
CE, which is better than you could do with isocratic elution IC," says James Fritz of Iowa State University-Ames Laboratory. Waters Corporation agrees. Although Waters offers a modular IC system, they have been promoting an alternative to IC called Capillary Ion Analysis (CIA) for the determination of inorganic ions. Because CIA uses hollow capillaries instead of a chromatography column and does not require a pump or a conductivity detector it is considered a subset of CE According to Waters CIA gives different selectivity than IC with analysis times of
