The World's Leading PTR-MS Trace Analyzers Company

Science award for LCU development

For his innovative developments leading to IONICON’s Liquid Calibration Unit (LCU), Lukas Fischer has been awarded with the Science Award of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. 

For IONICON innovation is our most valuable asset that is being cultivated in all our activities. When we initiated the development of the LCU, Lukas Fischer had just started as a Diploma student in the company.

“At the beginning it looked like a challenging project but we had no idea how many innovative steps were necessary to make the LCU the product it is today.”

says Jens Herbig, CTO of IONICON. The challenges were a perfect match for Lukas’ innovative approach. The development of the active Liquid Flow Controller is only one example.

WKO Wissenschaftspreis 2014 – Lukas Fischer on the right

The key feature of the LCU is controlled evaporation of a liquid flow into a gas stream to produce defined trace gas concentrations for calibration. This flow is only a few µl per minute. A flow controller for such micro flows needs to have an equally small dead-space in the order of a few µl, which we could not find in existing solutions. Therefore, a micro-pump, a micro-flowmeter, and a micro-processor board have been combined into the active Liquid Flow Controller that satisfies the low dead-space and is in addition self-aspiring, greatly facilitating the sample handling.

On December, 16th, 2014 Lukas’ diploma thesis has been recognized with the “Wissenschaftspreis” (Science Award) of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce (Innsbruck, Austria). Every year a jury selects outstanding and innovative academic projects with an economic impact.

Congratulations from the IONICON team!


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