Dr. Collins: CEM Corporation is a technology company that designs, develops and markets microwave instrumentation that is used in laboratories to perform various chemistries and in manufacturing for process and quality control. The markets we currently serve include the analytical market, where we produce sample preparation instrumentation for chemical analysis; the process and quality control market, which uses our instruments to measure moisture and fat content in various products in the food and chemical industries; and life sciences, our newest market with major applications in drug discovery, proteomics and genomics, where our microwave technology is used to perform rapid synthesis for making new compounds.
TWST: Could you describe the microwave technology as it relates
to the analytical field? And explain what microwave synthesis
means?
Dr. Collins: For the analytical field, we use microwave energy to
rapidly digest or extract various substances; we have developed
microwave instrumentation platforms and pressurized vessels that
allow us to do chemistry by superheating acids and solvents,
which speeds up these processes. Typically, with the traditional
conventional heating process, a digestion would take six to eight
hours; with microwave-based instrumentation and vessels under
high pressures or temperatures, we can perform the same process
in five to 10 minutes. Microwave-assisted methods are now well
accepted for completing digestions of substances, like soils and
plastics, for further elemental analysis. For instance, a company
that manufactures plastic toys needs to determine early in the
process if there are any harmful substances in the plastic. They
could quickly digest a sample of the plastic under microwave-
assisted conditions and then analyze it, ensuring product quality
while reducing manufacturing downtime and out-of-specification
product. In chemical synthesis, we are basically using microwaves
to cause chemical reactions to occur. Again, this is normally
done by mixing two things together and applying heat to encourage
them to react and form a new compound. We are replacing the
conventional conductive heat source with microwave energy,
enabling us to speed up these chemical reactions. Traditional
conductive heating normally requires eight to 24 hours; with
microwave-based instrumentation, chemists can now do these
reactions in less than five minutes. In addition to and equally
as important, chemists can now use microwave energy to perform
more difficult reactions that can't be done using conductive
heating. These reactions can be achieved with microwaves because
of the large amount of energy that can be introduced quickly into
the substances being synthesized. So microwave energy has major
advantages for doing chemical synthesis and it's our belief that
over the next three to four years it will become the preferred
way to perform chemical synthesis.
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