From monitoring emissions in industrial plant chimneys, to saving lives in hospitals with CO2 diagnostic breath tests, to controlling the ripening levels of bananas during shipment: continuous gas analysis is a fundamental requirement for many industrial applications.

Constructed in our Frankfurt factory, ABB’s continuous gas analyzers support these applications and more around the world. One of the core technologies powering these devices is infrared spectroscopy – known as URAS (abbreviated from German, ultra rot absorptions Schreiber).

Highly simplified, this works by shining an infrared light through a sample of gas and measuring how the light is absorbed. URAS was a breakthrough in gas analysis when invented by engineers Erwin Lehrer and Karl Friedrich Luft in 1938.

URAS has been continually innovated ever since, with ABB playing an important role to drive progress in reliability and precision to meet the needs of industry. One of the latest innovations, as demonstrated by our engineers in this episode, is a unique calibration cell technology.

This award-winning invention is a gamechanger, enabling quick and easy calibration with no need for bulky test gas cylinders. It helps customers reduce operating costs by up to 95%, while ensuring accurate measurement.

Our engineers‘ innovation goes beyond the technology itself. As we show in this episode, we’re also innovating how we build gas analyzers.

In the Frankfurt factory, we build a wide range of devices tailored to many specific applications – this requires a lot of different components, parts and processes. By optimizing the production line, we’re speeding up assembly while maintaining the quality and reliability our customers expect.