The Spectradyne nCS1TM nanoparticle analyzer

Watch a video of the nCS1 in action!

...and here's a transcript for your reading pleasure!


The following is a brief overview of Spectradyne's nCS1 nanoparticle analyzer.

The nCS1 leverages microfluidics technology and therefore only requires 3 microliters for each measurement.

Once the sample is in the cartridge, it's merely placed in the front of the nCS1 and then raised up inside.

From here, you merely click on Go in the nCS1 software and the system takes over from there. From this point on, everything is under computer control including all the external and internal fluidics of the system as you can see here.

The fill monitors shown here are monitoring the state of fluids inside of the cartridge. As these turn green, they're indicating that the cartridge is ready, and you can now begin the actual measurement.

Let's take a look at what's going on inside the actual measurement cartridge with the help of some fluorescent particles. So here you see the analyte on hold at the input port. The structure to the right is the filtering mechanism that's used to filter out particles that are too large for the nano-construction.

The analyte begins flowing from right to left as you can see here, and the larger particles get stuck upstream in the filters.

Further downstream at the nano-constriction, the particles are actually measured, and you can see that there's no clogging occurring because the larger particles were pre-filtered in the filter array as we saw before.

The nCS1 can characterize polydisperse samples with very high resolution, accuracy, and repeatability.

It's also very fast and can characterize up to 10,000 particles per second, meaning your complete sample analysis takes place in seconds.

As the particles transit the nano-constriction, they create a change in electrical signal that's directly proportional to the volume of the particle, regardless of its shape and regardless of the material it's made of.

So here's what this looks like in real time. The upper right window shows the raw data, which is processed and then turned into the particle size distribution in the lower right hand window as you can see there. We can zoom in and see the individual spikes that were made by the particle transits. Note that both graphs are updating in real time.

Once the live data has been saved, we can bring it up in the Viewer software to interrogate the data, make reports, etc. Here I've defined a region where the 94nm particles are, and I can click on Gaussian and find out that the system measured them as being 92.6nm with a concentration of 4 × 109 particles/mL. I can do the same with the 150nm beads.

Again, just outlining it, fitting a Gaussian to it, and find out that they were 152nm, and again with a concentration near 4 × 109 particles/mL.

This has been a brief overview of the nCS1 system. You can see some of the key features here and also some of the impact areas for the system.

We have other videos available on our website for more details. Thank you!


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We're happy to do demonstrations, or measure your samples.
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