Rajratan Center of IIT Indore – SIC – A National Facility of IIT Indore Developed and managed by Atul Singh

SIC

Sophisticated instrumentation center (SIC) was established in September 2011 to expedite the research program at IIT Indore. SIC has now emerged as one of the first such centers in the country providing extensive analytical instrument support to the users of the research fraternity across the country. A major advantage of SIC is its accessibility to the students within the institute as well as to other institutes and industries. A very healthy ratio of students to the time availability on instruments, and quick analysis of external samples makes it a very useful facility.

Details about why this center came into existence in an IIT and what is its role in which field or for whom ?

ICP-OES (Agilent 5800)

Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is an analytical technique used to determine how much of certain elements are in a sample.

The ICP-OES principle uses the fact that atoms and ions can absorb energy to move electrons from the ground state to an excited state. In ICP-OES, the source of that energy is heat from an argon plasma that operates at 10,000 kelvin.

Applications

ICP-OES is a powerful tool for the determination of trace and ultra-trace elemental concentrations in a wide variety of samples specifically for multi-element analysis.
With the help of ICP-OES we can determine metals in wine, arsenic in food, trace elements bound to proteins and metals contamination in drinking water and wastewater.
ICP-OES used for the determination of nutrient levels in agricultural soils. This information is then used to calculate the amount of fertilizer required to maximize crop yield and quality.
ICP-OES can determine what amount of certain oil additives remain in motor oils (and other lubricating oils) for quality control and compliance with production and industry specifications.