#41 - Plans for growth – Part 3

I wouldn’t exactly call the gradual development of Nova’s landfill gas analyzers a precisely planned sequence of continuous improvement. There is no ‘golden age’ space program story to tell here. When we look back, we seem to have ‘fallen into it’ from initially unintended beginnings.

It began a few years ago when inquiries starting coming in for methane analysis. Oxygen and carbon dioxide were also frequently of interest. The application would always be somewhat vague, with information about the actual sample gas make-up usually not provided. Keep in mind that we had more experience with clean process applications. So we would treat these new inquiries as such and recommend the equipment that we were accustomed to providing.

Nova’s Model 470 started out as a process methane analyzer which was intended for clean, dry, and noncorrosive process gases only. Clearly, landfill gas / biogas does not always fit that description. But we didn’t fully appreciate all of the nuances of that at the time.

We were aware that the sample gas usually had lots of moisture. So we had a thermo-electric sample chiller mounted in a second cabinet beside the main analyzer. We sometimes nick-named it the ‘pony cabinet’. With the ‘pony cabinet’ it was denoted as Model 470N4-400M. Other times we would build the chiller into the main cabinet and would be denoted as a Model 470MN4. We had used thermo-electric chillers in other applications, but there were problems sometimes with this approach on landfills.

Landfills are frequently in remote locations. Some have challenging climate and environmental conditions. The sample gas may contain high amounts of corrosive gases. Feedback from customers regarding analyzer performance / durability told us that landfill gas and biogas was not ordinary process gas. After visiting a few sites, we really started to take notice of what these applications were all about. We also started realizing that there were a lot of landfills and biogas projects out there. This called for clear plans for growth on our part – which is a convenient closing reference to the title of this post.

We will continue the gripping account in a future post.

Nova 910 Series Landfill & Biogas Analyzers

In the meantime, if you need gas analyzers for oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, or other gases, give Mike or Dave at Nova a call, or send us an e-mail.

1-800-295-3771
sales at nova-gas dot com
websales at nova-gas dot com
http://www.nova-gas.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/NOVAGAS

If you have a LinkedIn account, search for Nova Analytical Systems under Companies and follow us if you want.