Different tendencies
After the seventies, flow injection analysis underwent an amazing development and the tendency towards miniaturization, expansion of the application range, higher computer control and proposal of advanced manifolds was increased. Different commercially available flow analyzers were put into the market.
A noteworthy aspect was the inception of novel modalities derived of flow analysis such as sequential injection, lab-on-valve, etc. These modalities have been often relied on flow programming and considered to belong to different generations. I do not like this expression, as generation usually presupposes obsolescence, and the classical FIA analyzer cannot be considered as obsolete!
Here at CENA, the tendency was to enhance the system versatility though manifold programming. To this end, discretely operated devices (e.g. pumps and valves) were used. This led to the inception of the commutation [1060] and multi-commutation [5583] concepts.
Important achievements were attained by exploiting commutation, such as implementation of electrolytic dissolution of solid samples in flow analysis [1395], detector relocation [4088], exploitation of tandem streams [5583], etc. Other Brazilian institutions embraced this emerging technology and the proposals of mono segmented flow and flow-batch systems can be selected to illustrate some of the attained scientific results.
In the last two decades, CENA has been working in cooperation with the University of Porto and the focus has been also placed on manifold programming. Expressive contributions arose from this collaboration and multi-pumping flow systems, single interface flow analysis, and multi-site detection can be selected as expressive contributions.
