The detection and measurement of surface contamination and coatings is important in a number of different industries. Metal parts need to be free of cutting oils before painting -- lubrication coatings must be uniform -- the cleanliness of pharmaceutical reactors must be validated before returning them to use. The patented Remspec SpotView® system, with a grazing angle probe, provides a way to measure the thickness of very thin coatings down to the scale of a few tens of Angstroms or a few micrograms per square centimeter. SpotView® is ideal for studying surface contamination and verifying the cleanliness of large metal objects such as pharmaceutical batch reactors. A high-sensitivity MCT detector (with a Stirling cycle cooler) is mounted on the head. With very high sensitivity and the flexibility of a long cable, the Remspec room-temperature grazing angle probe marks a major step forward in spectroscopic thin film analysis and cleaning validation. BioPharm magazine article

This head features an onboard MCT detector with a Stirling cycle cooler, all prealigned and housed in a rugged plastic casing. With a flexible 3 m fiber-optic cable, the system is easy to use anywhere and the spot size (1.25 by 11.5 cm) means that uneven contamination is not a problem for SpotView®.		The patented SpotView® head delivers the mid-IR signal (shown in red) to the surface, and returns it to the on-board detector, at the "grazing angle" for maximum sensitivity.

The mid-IR spectrum of a 19 Angstrom thick lubricating layer on a hard disk drive (in red) is compared with the spectrum of an unlubricated drive (in blue).