Who we are?

SciAps, Inc. is a Boston-based instrumentation company specializing in portable analytical instruments to measure any element, any place on the planet. In August 2024 SciAps Inc was acquired by Spectris plc and will join Malvern Panalytical. Our industry-leading X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and laser-based (LIBS) analysers are at work across every major industry, including oil/gas, metals and mining, aerospace, battery and strategic metals (lithium, rare-earth elements), scrap metal recycling, chemical and petrochemical, military, forensics and law enforcement. SciAps instruments are configured to measure elements in all types of materials, so applications are always expanding, recently including space research, pandemic anti-viral coatings, agriculture, and environmental contaminants.

Ambition statements

As SciAps we are providing great portable instruments which will be used in this project. This includes the LIBS- as well as the XRF units. We are happy to see how our instruments are used in projects like DeepBEAT and are of course very happy to support and help in case of any questions regarding handling, software, data export etc.

Technologies

HH-XRF and HH-LIBS:

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is a non-destructive analytical method used to determine elemental concentrations in various materials. XRF works by striking a sample with an X-ray beam from an X-ray tube, causing characteristic X-rays to fluoresce from each element in the sample. A detector measures the energy and intensity (number of X-rays per second at a specific energy) of each X-ray, which is transformed into an elemental concentration using either a non-standard technique such as fundamental parameters or user-generated calibration curves. The presence of an element is identified by the element’s characteristic X-ray emission wavelength or energy. The amount of an element present is quantified by measuring the intensity of that element’s characteristic X-ray emission.

Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a type of optical emission spectroscopy used to measure elemental concentrations in a material. LIBS operates by using a pulsed, focused laser that is fired at a sample with sufficient pulse energy as to create a plasma around the area struck. Bound atomic electrons are striped from the atoms comprising the material. As the plasma cools, atoms recombine with electrons and in the process emit light in the UV, optical and IR regimes. LIBS has been used for more than 30 years as a laboratory technique, capable of analyzing any element in the periodic table. Recently, the technique has been miniaturized into a handheld device (HH LIBS) capable of analyzer any element, depending on the spectrometer range chosen for the device.