Rubber Consultants Installs New Formaldehyde Analysis Capability

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Located in beautiful surroundings in rural Hertfordshire, The Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre, founded in 1938, is the UK-based research and promotion centre of the Malaysian Rubber Board and home to Rubber Consultants. Its mission is to enhance the competitiveness and viability of the Malaysian rubber industries in the global environment through focused research & development, effective transfer of technology and high quality support services.

Rubber Consultants’ scientific and engineering excellence is focused towards the advancement of the Malaysian rubber industry through compounding and processing, materials and product development, engineering design, evaluation and testing and production technology.

Rubber Consultants has made and continues to make significant investments in analytical instrumentation and this coupled with a sizable team of experienced analytical scientists gives it the ability to tackle most tasks that it is confronted with.

Mark Perkins, one of Rubber Consultants’ senior analysts, made the point:

If you have a wide range of instrumentation and a pool of expereinced analysts to call upon, it is possible to tackle all kinds of analytical work from many different industries and our activities here are not restricted to rubber related tasks.The capabilities of our laboratory include:  

Pharma testing – extractables and leachables, polymer identification, reverse engineering of competitor products, polymer network studies, detailed examination of filler/polymer interaction, defect root cause analysis, benchmarking of products, production process trouble-shooting, compliance with regulatory requirements, and compliance with environmental requirements.  

Thermal analysis:  DSC, TGA, TG-IR.  Spectroscopy:  NMR, FTIR, FTIR-ATR.

Chromatography: GC-FID,GCMS, GC-NCD (Nitrogen Chemiluminescence Detector), GC-NPD Nitrogen Phosphorus Detector), IC, LCMS, HPLC, TLC.

Microscopy:  SEM, TEM including ultramicrotomy, OM, AFM.

Rubber Consultants' Head of Analytical Services; Sue Stephens explains:

In 2009, Rubber Consultants' analytical division had the opportunity to bid for a contract to analyse for the presence of traces of formaldehyde in materials used by the pharmaceutical industry. The LOD required for this analysis were very low and so our client had, as part of their method development, modified an Agilent GC with the addition of a Valco helium ionisation detector (HID). As a consequence, when the time came for the client to out-source the routine analytical work, we could not buy a standard instrument to do it on.

Our client had worked with Anatune before and recommended Anatune, as a company that had the capabilities to duplicate their non-standard analyser and to provide us with effective support.

The trace analysis of formaldehyde is challenging, as formaldehyde readily converts to other species and initially Rubber Consultants had some trouble getting the system to work. Despite the fact that the new system was identical to the development system operated by Rubber Consultants' client, the new system failed to generate acceptable peaks for formaldehyde.

Sue Stephens continued:

Anatune put in a lot of work to help us solve our problem and between the three of us [Anatune, Rubber Consultants and our client] we eventually traced the problem to two under-performing columns and got the system up and running.

Many equipment suppliers would have decided they had delivered the kit as ordered, and left us and our client to sort out the problems.  The team of Anatune engineers came back time and again to go through the system methodically, checking all possible sources of failure. The fact that two columns were found to be ineffective is down to the very demanding nature of this analytical application.  

The subsequent installation of a Gerstel MPS2 Headspace analyzer and prep station to an existing GC-MSD by Anatune was carried out smoothly and well within the quoted delivery time. This equipment has enabled Rubber Consultants to significantly enhance the capabilities of the above HID system, to analyse a wide variety of gas and volatile standards, beyond the formaldehyde testing the system was originally designed for. Again, Anatune has been instrumental in facilitating this.