| Q: Are you accredited for NIR |
| A: Central laboratories is UKAS accredited for NIR testing of Feed and Feed Ingredients along with Flour and Milling products. |
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| Q: Do you offer consultancy in NIR |
| A: Central Laboratories have many years of experience in NIR application development. Consultancy is offered from the simplest of applications to the more advance. A preliminary assesment report is issued with recommendations which could lead to a feasibilty study. |
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| Q: Do you offer NIR support contracts |
| A: Central Laboratories offer a variety of support contracts to cover your needs. At present there are three levels; Basic, Standard and Comprehensive at a range of prices to reflect the customer needs and expectations. |
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| Q: Do you offer proficiency schemes / ring tests for NIR |
| A: Yes, Central Laboratories proficiency schemes are available which allow the customer to compare the performance of their NIR instrument against the other members of the proficiency scheme. |
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| Q: Do you offer training |
| A: NIR training courses are available on request These are usually at manager,supervisor and operator level. However training can be customised to suit the customers requirements. A standard training schedule is followed and upon completion certificates are awarded to the participants. |
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| Q: How do I maintain a calibration |
| A: Maintaining calibrations is an important task to undertake if the quality of the results are to be maintained. On a regular basis certified reference material will need to scanned on the spectrophotometer and the predicted results compared to the reference result. The average difference should then be statistically evaluated for significance. Corrections can be made to the intercept of the equation within the Specman database. Central Laboratories on a regular basis send certified reference material to customer for such evaluation. Advice is always offered on interpretation of the results. However for long term maintanance INGOT equation are updated by Central Laboratories to reflect the change in nature of the product(s). |
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| Q: What applications do you have NIR calibrations for |
| A: We have vast data sets and calibrations are available for many products. Examples include : Finished feeds, Raw Materials, PetFood, Forage, Milling Products, Confectionary and Dairy. |
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| Q: What Instruments do you provide NIR calibrations for |
| A: Central Laboratories offers calibrations for a range of NIR instruments from filter to scanning, covering the majority of NIR hardware manufacturers. |
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| Q: What is a NIR calibration equation |
| A: A calibration equation is a series of constants derived by chemometric analysis to give a linear prediction line for a particular parameter. Absorbance measurements are captured from the product being analysed. These in turn are then multiplied by the constants (regression coefficients) and upon summation give a predicted answer. |
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| Q: What is an application |
| A: An application can be a single product to a variety of products, containing one or more properties(constituents). For example the customer may want to analyze a range of snack foods for moisture ,fat and protein. The application would be for snack foods. Similarly the customer may only have one product again that becomes an application for that product only.The Ingot equations themselves are applications for one or more products. |
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| Q: What is Chemometrics |
| A: A mathematical technique (regression) for relating the measured or transformed values at given wavelengths against the reference property values for all spectra in the calibration set. |
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| Q: What is cloning |
| A: Cloning as the word suggests is a procedure whereby the slave spectrophotometer is sprectrally matched to the master spectrophotometer from where the INGOT equations have been derived. This is usually performed by scanning at least 10 spectrally different samples on both master and slave units and producing a standardisation file. This standardisation file is then addded to your equations to make corrections to the slave spectra. |
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| Q: What is Correlation |
| A: The tendency for two sets of data to follow each other, that is to increase or decrease together (the correlation can be inversely proportional as well).This tendency is usually expressed numerically by the correlation coefficient. A correlation of 1.0 is a perfect agreement. |
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| Q: What is INGOT |
| A: INGOT (INTERNATIONAL NIR GLOBAL OPERATING TECHNOLOGIES) is a set of universal NIR calibrations for the analysis of raw materials and finished products. |
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| Q: What is NIR |
| A: Commonly known as Near Infrared Reflectance. It is the near infra-red portion of the electromagnetic spectrum comprising the wavelengths from 800- 2500nm. It is an area using the overtones and combination bands of the usual mid IR region. |
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| Q: What is Regression? |
| A: A mathematical technique (chemometrics) for relating the measured or transformed values at given wavelengths against the reference property values for all spectra in the calibration set. |
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| Q: What is Standard Error |
| A: The standard deviation of the differences between NIR predictions and reference values. The standard error is a way to evaluate how well the calibration equation fits the data. |
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