Libros de Milestone

As the performance of atomic spectroscopy techniques for elemental analysis has improved over the past decades, there has been a concurrent need for improvements in sample preparation. There are many important steps in the sample preparation workflow that impact the outcomes of the analyses. This seminar presents a ‘total workflow’ approach to sample preparation and propose ways to improve key aspects of elemental analysis, offering practical advice for preventing workflow disruptions, such as incomplete digestions or sample contamination, which can prevent a laboratory from meeting their overall performance and cost goals.

Food is the fuel for life and to keep our body in balance requires a careful consideration of the quality and the quantity of our food choices.
There are some elements that we must not ingest, such as arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. All these elements are critical if present in foods, and even worse if these foods are used to feed babies and infants.
Based on this background, the next steps to act would logically include increasing information about food composition and, of course, determining the concentrations of these elemental contaminants.
According to the new legislation we must be able to measure concentrations of As, Cd, Hg, and Pb in levels from 2 to 15 µg/kg. Analytical chemists have developed powerful strategies for determining trace elements. Of course, modern instrumental methods are important for meeting these analytical demands. However, despite having proper instrumentation available, we need to strengthen the analyst’s culture about working with trace concentrations in typical analytical procedures. Once again sample preparation will be shown as a fundamental step for obtaining accurate and precise results in trace analysis.
All the needed procedures will be highlighted in this Book and we will demonstrate how optimized procedures can be successfully developed and applied to meeting the demands of a “closer to zero plan.”

In the recent years, many countries are reducing the use of energy from the combustion of fossil fuels in favour of more renewable energy sources. To meet the demand of several industrial sectors, efficient and cost-effective storage is required. Li-ion battery offers these characteristics, so it has been employed in consumer electronic devices, electric and hybrid vehicles. However, impurities in raw materials and battery components directly impact the performance and the lifespan of the batteries. Therefore, the analysis of elemental impurities in the entire supply chain is vital to provide quality and safety of battery components and end-products.
As the Lithium-ion battery market quickly evolve, laboratories are often looking to address tasks which are not equipped for.
This new eBook titled Tackling sample preparation for elemental analysis in the lithium-ion battery industry is a practical guide toward the analysis of several components and materials used in their production and recycling process.

In this book, we will discuss the incremental and disruptive innovation of the microwave digestion system, starting from the first implementations of the rotor-based systems until the latest Single Reaction Chamber (SRC) technology. In order to keep up with the current spectroscopy instrumentations, and the needs of modern laboratories, microwave sample preparation has to provide an enhanced performance, a superior ease of use, lower costs per sample and a higher throughput. The SRC technology embraces all these needs in a single solution setting a new path in sample preparation. Laboratories now rely on a new approach to increase productivity and competitiveness without sacrificing the capabilities of the digestion and the quality of the analysis. The aim of the authors is to explain the reasons behind the development of the SRC technology, its operation principle, and the values that it brings to modern laboratories, through a series of case studies and the new opportunities it ensures in elemental analysis.

Are you ready for new United States Pharmacopeia 232, 233, and 2232 and also ICH Q3D pharma regulations considering inorganic elemental impurities? We hope yes, but maybe you are not. Frequently pharma laboratories are a world of chromatographs used for organic analysis. Now we are moving for a room with inductively coupled plasmas with optical emission or mass spectrometers (you will get used to new acronyms: ICP OES and ICP-MS). Yes, you will have new analytical instruments in your lab. Together with ICPs, you will also be engaged in sample preparation. You will use new procedures for as complete as possible oxidation of organic compounds and destruction of excipients followed by the determination of elemental constituents liberated in the liquid phase. Microwave-assisted preparation in closed vessels will become an important ally. This is the topic of this book where two analysts talk about this new demand and how to get prepared for it. A Q&A style was adopted for making your reading easier and funnier. The authors hope you enjoy it.

Think Green is a natural sequel of our former Think Blank book. Think Blank targets the application of analytical procedures compatible with requirements of trace analysis and microwave-assisted sample preparation is a strong ally for reaching these goals. By adopting a Think Blank approach we decrease the volumes and concentrations of reagents for improving blanks and consequently for reaching better limits of detection. Well, if we reduce the amounts of reagents we are by extension going green. In this sense, requirements for greening sample preparation procedures aiming trace analysis are proposed and discussed here. For instance, have you thought about energy needed for promoting and keeping the reaction system heated? What about reaction conditions for attaining efficient digestions? Have you thought about generation of too reactive or dangerous products? How about risks to the analyst and to the environment? Let us think again. In this book modern strategies for developing green digestions are presented and we demonstrated how available instrumentation allows us to reduce the use, to substitute critical reagents, and even how to recycle and reuse reagents. We believe there is a need to keep an eye on blank procedure performance and another eye on green strategies for meeting goals searched for up-to-date and ease-of-use procedures fully applied for trace analysis.

Instrumental analysis has continuously evolved in the last decades and determination of trace elements is becoming a routine task in analytical laboratories. Inductively coupled plasmas with argon gas are successfully applied for measurements of emission lines (ICP OES) and isotopes (ICP-MS) for most elements of periodic table. However, a laboratory must have full control of analytical blanks and sample preparation for obtaining accurate results. In this book we discuss how to control contaminations and modern strategies for microwave-assisted sample preparation. Discussions comprehend digestions with diluted acid solutions, microwave-assisted evaporation, microwave vessels with inserts, vapor phase microwave digestion, and single reaction vessel. Modern procedures for sample preparation fully compatible with multielement determinations are presented and experimental data are shown. Instruments and accessories for implementing these strategies are presented. The goal of the authors was to produce a readable text for practical analysts and for everyone interested in the evolution of sample preparation strategies.

The role of the analytical chemist has not changed since the inception of the discipline. However, the questions for which society wants answers have become more challenging. Instrumental analysis has continually evolved to keep up with the analysis demands, but sample preparation has failed to keep up with the evolutions of modern trace organic analysis instrumentation. In this book we discuss the importance of sample preparation for trace organic analysis. Part I focuses on the fundamental theory of extracting an analyte from a sample matrix, modern extraction techniques, and post extraction processing. Part II reviews modern instrumental analysis techniques as they relate to the sample preparation process and Part III discusses how advances in microwave technology bring sample preparation to the same standards as instrumental techniques. The goal of the authors was to produce a text that helps today’s trace organic analyst understand and overcome the difficulties of sample preparation by learning how to THINK GREEN.

Microwave Chemistry describes the state-of-the-art of microwave (MW) technology and its applications in chemistry.
Released by the publishing house De Gruyter, the book is a clear proof that microwave-enhanced chemistry is today influencing several areas of science, from sample preparation for elemental and organic determination to genomics or proteomics field, from drug discovery to catalysis, from synthesis of nanoparticles to inorganic compounds, from nano-materials to polymer chemistry, and so on. Although not entirely related to Milestone products, MICROWAVE CHEMISTRY testifies our know-how and commitment in this field of science.
The list of contributors is indeed impressive, as it includes leading scientists in microwave chemistry from all over the world (Prof. Satoshi Horikoshi from Japan, Prof. Antonio de la Hoz from Spain, Prof. Erico Flores from Brazil, just to mention a few).