For over 30 years, Elementar has been the German pioneer in high temperature TOC analysis.

Elementar’s high temperature combustion method to measure organic contaminations provides a multitude of advantages compared to low temperature UV-digestion or wet chemical methods (e.g. COD):

- Analysis time of 2–3 min compared to up to 1.5 hours in case of COD

- Safe and environmentally clean operation without concentrated acids, oxydizing agents or other aggressive chemicals or hazardous waste

- 100% C recovery independent from sample type and matrix also with particle or salt containing solutions

- Simultaneous analysis of totally bound nitrogen (TNb) in addition to TOC

- Fully automatic operation with high sample throughput and low analysis costs

The vario TOC cube is a totally new analyzer for TOC/TNb analysis for all types of samples from ultrapure (pharmaceutical) water, drinking water, industrial waste water, suspensions or solids with even very difficult sample matrices.The basic concept combines for the first time the features of a high performance water analyzer with a century of experience in organic elemental analysis of carbon in solids.The measuring principle for all operation modes is the oxidation of bound carbon into CO₂. The liquid sample is directly injected into the combustion reactor at 900°C in an air carrier gas stream. Solid samples are weighed in a tin container and fed automatically via a ball valve. The gas is dried, flow stabilized and finally measured with a NDIR detector. A connected PC calculates the total carbon concentration (TC) from the measured CO₂ signal and the sample weight.Inorganic (carbonate) carbon (TIC) can be measured automatically by acidifying the sample in a sparger and stripping and detecting the released CO₂. The equation TOC=TC-TIC gives you the content of total organic carbon. In addition the total bound nitrogen (TNb) can be measured simultaneously to TOC by means of NO sensitive electrochemical (EC) or chemiluminescence (CLD) detectors.