The complete contamination picture

The FTIR instrument, a Gasmet DX4040, is owned by North Shore Environmental Construction (NSEC), a specialist in the management of hazardous materials response and environmental challenges.

NSEC routinely employs specialist consultants for the more technically complex investigations and Michael McCoy, M.S., CIH, CHMM, CSP from GZA GeoEnvironmental provides a high level of expertise in these applications, which includes evaluation of the data.

NSEC specializes in hazardous materials response and clean-up and field-based environmental construction.  Much of GZA’s work involves site investigation to characterize levels of environmental contamination and human exposure to potentially hazardous or toxic substances.

As a portable FTIR gas analyser, the DX4040 effectively enables laboratory grade analysis onsite which dramatically increases the speed with which contamination can be assessed, and avoids the problems, costs and delays associated with transporting samples to a laboratory.

Michael McCoy said: “Many portable gas monitoring instruments either just measure an individual gas or provide an aggregated reading for a group of compounds – VOCs for example. In contrast, the DX4040 is able to measure up to 25 individual compounds simultaneously. It achieves this by producing a spectrum for the measured compounds, which means that we can set the instrument to display almost live readings for the compounds of potential interest.

“A major advantage of Gasmet’s FTIR analyzers, however, is their ability to identify unknown compounds. Calcmet software facilitates the identification of unknown peaks in a spectrum by comparison with Gasmet’s vast library of stored spectra.”