Product News: ESA Biosciences Introduces ‘Corona Plus’ for Greater Solvent Compatibility

25 May 2006

ESA Biosciences, Inc., a subsidiary of Magellan Biosciences, Inc., announces that its award-winning Corona™ Charged Aerosol Detector (CAD™) has been enhanced for greater compatibility with solvents used in industrial, chemical and polymer analyses.

The new ‘Corona Plus’ is designed to address the needs of laboratory personnel who utilize THF (tetrahydrofuran) as a mobile phase component in their chromatographic separations and sample analyses. THF is a commonly used solvent in a number of industries including polymer analysis for solubilizing and separating various types of polymers.

“Corona Plus will broaden the marketplace for the Corona CAD,” said John Christensen, ESA Vice President. “Since it was introduced last year, the Corona CAD has been purchased by every major pharmaceutical company in the world. Now, with this added capability, polymer laboratories will soon be benefiting from Corona’s revolutionary technology as well.”

The Corona Charged Aerosol Detector offers all-in-one performance benefits that refractive index (RI), low wavelength (UV), evaporative light scattering (ELS), and chemiluminescence nitrogen (CLN) detector methods lack. Its superior performance typically provides ten times the sensitivity of ELS, a broad dynamic detection range over four orders of magnitude, more consistent response factors independent of chemical structure and full gradient capability, delivering for the first time to the HPLC market almost complete universality.

Charged Aerosol Detection is a robust HPLC detection technology that delivers advanced capabilities of interest to every HPLC user-lab. The HPLC column eluent is nebulized and the resulting droplets are evaporated at ambient temperature producing analyte particles. A second stream of gas is positively charged as it passes a high-voltage, platinum corona wire. The charged gas collides with and transfers charges to the opposing stream of analyte particles. A negatively charged, low-voltage ion trap removes high-mobility ions while analyte particles transfer their charge to a collector. The charge transferred to the collector is in direct proportion to analyte mass.