LMT Wins SBIR Phase I from NASA

Leiden Measurement Technology has won a Phase I SBIR award from NASA. LMT has been funded to develop a novel system capable of extracting, separating, trapping, concentrating, and transferring analytes for analysis in other instruments. LMT has completed this project and demonstrated that it is possible to extract and separate three key chemical classes using subcritical water coupled to solid phase extraction: polar organics, non-polar organics, and inorganic anions and cations from complex matrices that include Mars analog salt mixtures.

---

In this Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I Project, Leiden Measurement
Technology (LMT) developed and breadboarded a low-volume analyte separation, concentration, and transfer system, known as ConTech. For our phase I breadboard-prototype, we coupled this technology with a compact subcritical water (SCW) extractor and demonstrated an end-to-end system that can be used to extract, separate, concentrate, and transfer inorganic and organic analytes from complex host matrixes (e.g., soil, regolith) to a broad range of analytical instruments in-situ. ConTech provides a low-risk technology for in-situ sample extraction, manipulation, storage and transfer to support analytical instrumentation. The technology will be developed for compatibility with state-of-art in-situ instruments currently under development by NASA including: microfluidic based systems, bioarrays, gas chromatographs, high-performance liquid chromatographs, UV fluorimeters, Raman spectrometers,  and mass spectrometers.