A local company shifted gears to help all!
DetraPel, located in Framingham, MA is a cleantech company that started in 2013. The company is devoted to creating safe and non-toxic protective coatings for customers and industrial applications. Their liquid repellants help to protect equipment and items from stains and spillage, all while being non-toxic (they even secured offers on Shark Tank in 2018)! As the world was hit with the curveball of COVID-19 in 2020, DetraPel quickly pivoted to help combat disinfectant shortages.
Testing Sanitizers and Disinfectants
For a product (such as hand sanitizers) that is EPA registered, there are multiple active ingredients that must be accurately reported. Not only must they maintain great accuracy with their reporting, but the products must also maintain a certain percentage of each active ingredient to be effective and to maintain their registration. This means that the percent actives (active ingredients) need to be precisely measured. One of the best ways to measure for active ingredients in the sanitizers and disinfectants is titration.
DetraPel was manually titrating to determine the concentrations of the active ingredients. This was costly (in both time and effort) and they were unable to make adjustments to their production lines in live-time. Due to titrating manually, they were also subject to the issues associated with manual titration. These include lower resolution results and subjectivity of color changing endpoints. Therefore, results varied from lab tech to lab tech. This caused a lot of repeat work. DetraPel then reached out to Hanna Instruments for help.
DetraPel and Hanna Instruments
It was later in 2020 that DetraPel reached out in their investigation of Automatic Titration. Being able to perform titrations at the press of a button, instead of working for hours over a manual titration has been a game-changer. By using the HI931 Automatic Titrator DetraPel is able to precisely determine the end of the titration with a dynamic dosing pump, a nitrate ISE (ion selective electrode), and automatic calculations. This has allowed the manufacturing process to be as streamlined as possible.
"Something is off with the percent active results, we can take the sample to our laboratory, do a quick adjustment, and retest it... you can literally make decisions very quickly."
- Juan Jarufe, Chief R&D Officer
Simple Is The Way To Go
The simplicity of the titration, coupled with Hanna Instrument's customer service and Applications Team, has helped DetraPel to become confident in their use of an automatic titrator.
Got Questions?
For more information regarding how Hanna Instruments can help you with all of your testing needs, contact us, at sales@hannainst.com or 1-800-426-6287.
