1 CPAC: May 11, 2006 NeSSIfying GC a proposal to the Washington Technology Center Brian Rohrback, Infometrix, Inc. CPAC Team David Veltkamp, Brian Marquardt, Mel Koch and Jaromir Ruzicka

2 CPAC: May 11, 2006 Life in the Petroleum Industry US Oil sector shed more than 500,000 jobs between 1982 and 2005 American Petroleum Institute surveyed and found a projected need for 30,000 engineers over the next 5 years Total current enrollment in petroleum-related engineering programs in US universities stands at 1,500

3 CPAC: May 11, 2006 Whither Process GC? Process GCs generate a lot of data; very little of the information content of that data is mined from the existing installations Automation has to reduce maintenance demands of the on- line instruments There is a strong need to standardize and simplify the calibration of a collection of process GCs (worldwide?) There are powerful financial and quality incentives to bring more complex GC analysis on-line

4 CPAC: May 11, 2006 WTC Proposal Software and Algorithm Tasks Retention time alignment –Test additional algorithms for speed and computer horsepower requirements –Evaluate accuracy precision of shift and quantitation Evaluate EZChrom Use chemometrics tools to develop a reliable means of making hardware corrections automatically GC data compression

5 CPAC: May 11, 2006 WTC Proposal Prototyping a NeSSI GC Design and construction of fluidics –Build a test platform to handle stream switching, blending and sample injection NeSSI GC interface –Integrate the ASI MicroFast GC –Assess feasibility of commercial microfabricated GCs Sensor addition/data fusion –Use of vaporchromic sensors, temperature, pressure, … –Differentiate instrument malfunction from process upsets

6 CPAC: May 11, 2006 WTC Proposal Applications Evaluate three hydrocarbon analysis applications –Extract organics from a wastewater stream and ID source –Test pollutants in air to schedule maintenance –Characterize input naphtha to optimize a catalytic cracker Expand the application base –Draw from food, pharmaceutical, biotech –Evaluate the commonality of function

7 CPAC: May 11, instruments: C 8 to C 19 hydrocarbons Raw data Time (seconds) Instrument to instrument consistency

8 CPAC: May 11, instruments: C 8 to C 19 hydrocarbons Auto-Aligned Time (seconds) Instrument to instrument consistency

9 CPAC: May 11, 2006 PCA scores before and after alignment Alignment gives us: A means of eliminating the run- to-run variability that affects all forms of chromatography. Requires no internal standards and no use (in the traditional sense) of external standards, both of which are impractical.

10 CPAC: May 11, 2006 Process GC data processing in action

11 CPAC: May 11, 2006 Process Gas Chromatographs Reviewed 12 systems that can be used in process analysis –ABB, Emerson, Foxboro, Siemens, Yokogawa –Agilent, PerkinElmer, Shimadzu, Thermo, Varian –ASI, SLS Micro Selected 3 as the focus of the current development effort, driven by CPAC interest, cost to develop, and time to market

12 CPAC: May 11, 2006 Summary To use chromatography in a process setting, we need to process the data automatically. Retention time drift is a constant companion but can be corrected by software in a fully automated way. The result of alignment is better run-to-run peak identification and can unify data from more than one chromatograph. With aligned data, interpretation is both more sensitive and more reliable, allowing unattended assessment of samples, the instrument and the process as a whole.