Tuesday November 15, 2011 at 3:50pm
Over the last day or so, the attention of the global media has been attracted by a study concluding that occupational exposure to a once-common chlorinated solvent substantially raises the chance of acquiring Parkinson’s Disease.
The study, published on 14 November in Annals of Neurology, found that long-term exposure to trichloroethylene (aka TCE or trichloroethene) was found to raise the risk of Parkinson’s Disease by more than a factor of 6. Two other ‘air toxics’, p....
Friday November 4, 2011 at 9:37am
David Barden, Media Officer at Markes International, dusts off his physics books and gets to grips with Peltier cooling, one of the key technologies behind Markes’ thermal desorption instrumentation.
The Peltier effect, despite being first noticed by Jean Peltier in 1834, remained a backwater of physics for over a century. However, in the last few decades, the technology has experienced a revival, leading to its incorporation into a number of commercial systems, our thermal desorption in....
Monday September 19, 2011 at 10:13am
Caroline Widdowson, Material Emissions Specialist at Markes International, examines what the upcoming EU Construction Products Regulation will mean for materials manufacturers, testing laboratories, and the GC(MS) industry.
Concerns about air quality used to be associated just with outdoor air, but as this has got cleaner, attention has shifted to the quality of indoor air. Clearly, the most troublesome VOCs from indoor materials are those that are both toxic and widespread, and manufactur....
Thursday August 11, 2011 at 2:31pm
Matt Bates, Thermal Desorption Product Manager at Markes International, gets a handle on the amounts of volatile organic compounds present in the air
Speaking as an analytical chemist, I quite happily use ‘parts per billion volume’ (ppbv) to describe concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the ambient atmosphere – but it’s easy to lose sight of what these values actually represent in real life.
The air we breathe is made up predominantly of permanent ga....
Thursday August 4, 2011 at 2:04pm
David Barden, media officer at Markes International, introduces the Markes blog and explains why, if you’re interested in thermal desorption or the wider world of air analysis, you ought to take a look.
What did you think when you saw the ‘blog’ tab on our homepage? Curiosity? Surprise? Incredulity? Whatever your thoughts, you might legitimately question whether there’s anything worth blogging about on the subject of thermal desorption equipment. What we hope to prove b....