Analytical Community Rewards Centrifugal Field-Flow Fractionation System with 2012 Innovations Award 

The new CF2000 Series for high-resolution separation and fractionation of nanoparticles, from Postnova Analytics, has won the prestigious GIT Innovations Award 2012 in the category ‘Analytical Instrumentation and Software’. The Postnova team are the inventors of the Field-Flow Fractionation (FFF) technique, and developed the CF2000 to be the first Centrifugal FFF system for routine use.

Dr Thorsten Klein, Founder and CEO, Postnova, said: “It is a great honour to receive this award. To be acknowledged by scientists working at the bench is particularly important for us as it shows that our innovative products are recognised as powerful practical tools for daily analysis, exactly what we designed them to be. I would like to thank the publishers at G.I.T. Verlag for sponsoring the award, the independent jury who placed the CF2000 on the shortlist and, most of all, everyone who took the time to vote for us online, at Analytica, and at Achema.”

The CF2000 is modular, allowing for a range of different detectors: Multi-Angle Light Scattering (MALS), Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) and Refractive Index (RI), for example, to be integrated. Whatever the configuration, everything from autosampler to detector is fully controlled by the NovaFFF software platform.

Importantly, by using a centrifugal field as the controlling force for the separation, particles are separated by Dynamic Diffusion on the basis of size and density. This novel approach allows discrimination of materials that have the same particle size but different densities.

The CF2000 has a wide operation range and is able to separate smaller species, such as proteins and polymers, from larger particles in one run with high resolution. The system is ideal for nanoparticles and works up into the microparticle size range too. No special sample treatment is necessary, allowing challenging biopharmaceutical, food-cosmetics, nanomaterial and environmental samples to be characterised.