This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will provide new technology to build practical calorimeters for industrial applications. Calorimetry has long been a powerful tool in biological research. Applications have been developed that solve a host of analytical and production problems in many industries, such as pharmaceuticals, food processing, waste treatment, environmental monitoring, agriculture, and biotechnology. However, these have not been widely applied because of the lack of affordable instrumentation with high throughput and sample containers suitable for measuring biological samples. The single most important missing element in the design of such a calorimeter is a sensitive, inexpensive heat flux sensor having an output signal large enough to be measured by standard circuitry. Thermalytics, Inc., proposes to design and test a unique thermopile sensor which would fill this need, and to use it to construct a multiple cell isothermal calorimeter prototype. This proposed Phase I effort will also incorporate other innovative design elements which will demonstrate the feasibility of producing relatively low-cost calorimeters suitable for processing large numbers of industrial biological samples. The technology to be developed could be also applied to other types of calorimeters, and the integrated circuit sensor may prove useful in other types of heat flux measurements.
